“I want to take you over to Herwick. I don’t know about you but I generally get a feel about a place by mooching about it. We’ve no evidence, there’s nothing c but I want to get your reaction.”

Serrailler and Chapman went to Herwick with Lester Hicks in the back. Hicks was a taciturn Yorkshireman, small and chunkily built with a shaved head and the chauvinist attitude which Simon had encountered before in Northern men. Although apparently without imagination, he came across as sane and level-headed.

Herwick was a town on the fringes of the York plain and seemed to have spread haphazardly. The outskirts were a ribbon of industrial units, DIY warehouses and multiplexes, the town centre full of charity shops and cheap takeaways.

“What’s the work here?”

“Not enough c chicken packing factory, several big call centres but they’re cutting back—all that work’s going abroad, it’s cheaper. Big cement works c otherwise, unemployment. Right, here we go. This is the Painsley Road c there’s a link road to the motorway a couple of miles further on.” They continued slowly and then took a left turn. “This is where the Tyler house is c number 202 c”

It was a road without feature. Semis and a few run-down detached houses; a couple of shopping rows—newsagent, fish-and-chip shop, bookmaker, launderette; an undertaker’s with lace-curtained windows and a flat-roofed building at the back.

The Tyler house was two doors away from it. Bright red herringbone bricks were newly laid where a front garden had been. The fence was gone too.

They slowed.

“Scott should have approached the house from this end c he would have come from the junction.”

No one took any notice of the car crawling along the kerb. A woman pushed a pram, an old man drove along the pavement in an invalid buggy. Two dogs mated by the side of the road.

“What kind of people?” Serrailler asked.

“Tylers? He’s a plumber, the wife works as a shrink-wrapper in the chicken factory. Decent sort. Kids seem fine.”

“How have they been?”

“Father doesn’t say much but he’s blaming himself for not fetching the boy by car.”

“Scott’s parents?”

“On the verge of killing one another c but I think they always have been. His sister seems to carry the weight of the family on her shoulders.”

“And she’s c”

“Thirteen going on thirty. Here’s where Scott would have turned the corner c this road leads to his own house. It’s in a small close a couple of hundred yards down, set off the main road.”

“No sighting of him along here?”

“No sighting, period.”

Another bleak road, with the houses set behind fences or scruffy privet hedges. Three large blocks of flats. A disused Baptist chapel with wooden bars across the doors and windows. Traffic was steady but not heavy.

“It’s hard to believe nobody saw the boy.”

“Oh they’ll have seen him c just didn’t register.”

“It must have looked normal then, there can’t have been any sort of struggle, just as there can’t have been any when David Angus was taken. No one misses the sight of a child being forcibly dragged into a car.”

“Someone they both knew?”

“Both boys can’t have known the same person, that’s way off being likely. So, we’ve got two different kidnappers. Each one well enough known to the child to c” Simon trailed off. They all knew it was not worth his finishing the sentence.

“This is Richmond Grove. It’s number 7 c bottom right.”

The houses were crammed on to a skimpy plot. Simon could guess how much noise came through thin dividing walls, how small the area of garden at the back of each one.

Chapman turned off the car engine. “Want to get out?”

Serrailler nodded. “Will you wait here?”

He walked slowly round. The curtains of number 7 were drawn. There was no car, no sign of life. He looked at the house for a long time, trying to picture the gap-toothed boy coming out of the door, swimming bag over his shoulder, walking up towards the road c turning left c marching along, cheerful. He turned. A bus went past but there seemed to be no bus stop for some way ahead. Simon looked along the grey road. How far had Scott gone? Who had stopped beside him? What had they said that had persuaded the boy to go with them?

He made his way back to the car.

“Give me an idea of the boy c Shy? Forward? Old or young for his age?”

“Cheeky. Teachers said that. But OK. They liked him. Not a problem. Lots of friends. Well liked. Bit of a ringleader. Football supporter, the local team. They call them the Haggies. Had their logo on his swim bag, all the strip.”

“The sort of kid who would chat to a stranger, maybe someone asking for directions?”

“Very likely.”

Whereas David Angus was altogether more reserved but one who would have spoken to the same sort of stranger because it was the polite thing to do.

Hicks’s phone rang. Three minutes later, they were racing back to police HQ. Hicks’s wife, and Chapman’s daughter, had gone into labour a fortnight early with their first child.

Serrailler spent the rest of the afternoon alone going through the files on the Scott Merriman case. At one point he found the canteen for a mug of tea. At half past six, he drove over to the hotel.

His room was beige with gilt fittings and smelled of old cigarette smoke, the bath big enough for a ten-year-old. Jim Chapman had left with hurried apologies, saying he would “catch up later.” It was a toss-up as to which would be worse c lying on the bed in his room brooding, sitting alone in the bar brooding, or making the long drive back to Lafferton down overcrowded motorways. Heavy rain had set in. Simon did not fancy the drive.

He showered and put on a clean shirt.

The bar was empty apart from a businessman working at a laptop in the corner. The furniture was lacquer red. There was a cocktail menu on every table. Simon got a beer.

He was always content in his own company but the ugliness of these surroundings and the isolation from everything he knew and loved seemed to be draining the life out of him. In a couple of months he would be thirty-seven. He felt older. He had always loved being a policeman but something about the life was beginning to frustrate him. There were too many restrictions, too many political-correctness boxes to be ticked before getting on with a job. Was he making any difference to anyone? Had a single life improved, even marginally, because of what he did? He thought of the difference his sister Cat made, as a conscientious and caring doctor, of what his parents had done in their time to change lives. Perhaps they had been right all along, perhaps he should have gone into medicine and made his father happy.

He slumped against the shiny red banquette. The barman had switched on starlights around the bar but it did not lift the atmosphere.

What he missed, Simon thought suddenly, was excitement, the adrenalin rush, such as he had had pursuing the serial killer on his own patch two years previously, and which had almost always been there in the early days of his police career. His Chief Constable had hinted more than once that he should get on to the next rung of the ladder but if he rose to Superintendent and beyond he would spend even less time out on the job, even more in his office, and that he did not want. It was the old story c don’t become a Head if you love teaching, don’t take a senior medical role if you enjoy looking after patients. If you want the thrill of the chase, stay in uniform or as a DC. But he had not and there was no going back. Should he get out altogether? He knew what he would do if he left the force. Some of his drawings were to be exhibited in a London gallery; the show was opening in November. He would travel and draw full time, give them the attention and concentration they deserved. He would get by. Money was not his motive. But he wondered as usual whether he would gain as much satisfaction and pleasure from art if he had to live by it. Perhaps everything staled after a time.