As he joined the motorway and speeded up, he felt the usual shift, as if a switch had clicked within him. He left Ed Sleightholme, murdered children and kidnapped women behind, and his mind was cleared of them all. He was no longer DCI Serrailler, he was Simon Osler, with a solo exhibition of his drawings being staged at a Mayfair gallery. Many of the people who would come to look and to buy had no idea that he was a CID officer, and that was how he liked it. When he had had to deal with criminals who had led double lives he had usually understood and empathised. In itself, to lead two lives was not a crime; it depended on what you did in them. If he had been forced to choose between his two he would have found it difficult. They balanced one another; neither life was quite enough on its own.

Twice he heard his mobile ring but it was in his jacket on the back seat. He would check the messages when he stopped next. He had not left all of his involvement in current cases behind him.

Dennis Vindon from forensics got up from his hands and knees and went to the window. Outside, it was quiet. People had grown bored. There was nothing to see but white suits going out to the van from time to time, carrying things which they put inside before plodding back and closing the front door. The things were wrapped and no one could have any idea what they were. Dennis knew. They were sections of carpet. Cushions. Pieces of linoleum. The scrapings from the inside of cupboards. Bed sheets. Things bagged, tied and labelled.

No one spoke to the white suits and the white suits neither spoke to nor looked at the women hanging about the gate. It was always women, Dennis thought now, looking down at the sunlit street. Men—even unemployed men—didn’t seem to have the ghoulish interest in watching a crime scene. If this was a crime scene. He had been at a good many and he had never known a neater, cleaner, more orderly house. And it was not a house that had been urgently scrubbed to erase traces, it was a house that was always tidy, clean and orderly. Nice house really. You had to say that. A few books. Some pretty china that looked like Victorian. Coloured cushions. It was a house someone had enjoyed putting together. He had a sense of things when he went to pull a place apart and his sense here was that there had been no crime committed; no one had been tortured or killed here. None of the missing children had been pushed into a cupboard under the stairs or their clothes taken out and burned in the garden incinerator. If Sleightholme was the abductor of the missing children, she had done nothing at home and brought nothing to it.

Jo Caper walked into the room and whistled.

They both stood at the window now, looking out.

“There isn’t going to be anything there either,” Dennis said at last. The garden was tidy and well kept. A rectangle of lawn. Flower beds on either side, with rose bushes and a buddleia, a lilac tree at the bottom. A standard six-by-four shed which had been stripped already. A table with two plastic garden chairs upended on to it. “Pity, that.”

Because, by the end of the week, they were going to have to dig it up. Waste of time, waste of effort especially in the sun; there would be nothing buried in the garden. He just knew.

“You?”

Jo shook her head. “Nothing. Just finished bagging up her clothes. That’s it then in the bedrooms.”

“Any news on the car?”

“I heard Luke say there might be. Tomorrow maybe.”

“That’s where it’ll be. If there’s anything. It’s always the car.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yeah, yeah, but this time I just know it.”

“Ah, you’ve got your bent coat hanger out?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“I heard.”

Dennis had once, just the once, doused a garden and found a well beneath a newly laid patio, and a body plus a lot of water.

“Right. Back to the underlay.”

“You want a Coke?”

“Nah, be lukewarm.”

“No, I put it in the fridge downstairs.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Probably not,” Jo said, sailing out.

In her own house, Kyra sat in front of a My Little Ponyvideo behind drawn curtains. Occasionally, she got up and pulled one back to peer at Ed’s house but there was never anything to see.

My Little Ponyhad sickly voices and tinkly music and Kyra hated it, but she daren’t switch the video off in case her mother heard and came in. Natalie was on the phone to Donna Campbell, her best friend.

Kyra sat back on the sofa and closed her eyes, but this time she didn’t try to see a block of colour or black velvet; she went in her mind through Ed’s front door and into each room of the house in turn, checking on things—the furniture, the books, the flowery cups and saucers, the two clown dolls dangling from the shelf.

She tried to remember everything. Then she would know what the white suits had taken or moved around. She meant to get into Ed’s house somehow— she had to get into it. She felt that Ed would want her to, would trust her and no one else to check on things.

Her mother woke her, raking the curtains open and shouting. The television had been switched off.

“Get up, I gotta take you out.”

“Where are we going?”

“See someone. Come on, Kyra, move, you need your hair brushing and a clean T-shirt, I’m not having people think I don’t bother.”

“What sort of someone are we going to see?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

“Where?”

“Oh, bloody hell, Kyra, you’re one big blasted question mark, you.”

Natalie was furious. She and Donna had decided to take their kids to the supermarket where there was a supervised play area. They could shop a bit, have a coffee, talk, and not be mithered all afternoon by Kyra and Donna’s kid. The fact that Kyra said she hated Danny Campbell was irrelevant to Natalie. When she had asked Kyra why she hated him, Kyra had said it was because he bit her when no one was looking. But the marks on Kyra’s arm never looked like bites. More like pinches, and what kid didn’t get pinched from time to time?

“Pinch him back,” Natalie had said, “that’ll teach him. Don’t be a wimp, Kyra, you’ll get nowhere in this world being a wimp.”

But when Natalie had put the phone down after making the arrangement, it had rung again and it was the police, saying she’d to take Kyra down now, there was a meeting arranged for them to talk to her. They wouldn’t change it. It had to be now.

Natalie wrenched Kyra’s head round to redo her ponytail. “Bloody keep still, will you?”

“Where are we going?”

Natalie shook her head through a mouthful of pink nylon scrunchy.

As they went out two of the white suits were getting into the van, and as Natalie started the car another came out of Ed’s front door, locked it and put the key in her white-suit pocket. Kyra stared at her hard, trying to memorise everything so that she could tell Ed.

Twenty-four

There were a dozen people kneeling in the Chapel of Christ the Healer. Cat Deerbon joined them at the back. The evening sun sifted through the side-aisle windows, so that the light was a dusty gold. She came to the healing service as often as possible and tonight two of her own patients were in the front pews.

Footsteps came across the chancel and as Cat looked round, she saw that it was Jane Fitzroy. There had been a paragraph in the local paper about her ordeal at the hands of Max Jameson, and Cat’s mother, Meriel Serrailler, had mentioned that Jane was staying with the Precentor and his family for a few days. Cat glanced at her as she went by but could read nothing into her expression, though she seemed to hesitate slightly before going up the single step to the altar.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen.”

“Christ Jesus, who healed those brought to him in sickness of body and mind, hear our prayers this evening for those present and elsewhere who come to you in faith. Give the strength, comfort and assurance of your presence with us at the laying on of hands and look graciously on all who c on c”