Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Lucie Whitehouse 2019

Lucie Whitehouse asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photographs © Plain Picture (tunnel scene); © Shutterstock (figure)

Epigraph taken from The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008269036

Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008269012

Version: 2019-11-12

Dedication

For Bridget

Epigraph

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign

That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’

So long, but found I wasn’t even clear

Which side was which.

Philip Larkin

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Robin surveyed the table with its heap of crumpled napkins and burger boxes, stray fries and onion rings, the pile of bleeding ketchup packets. Aftermath of the cholesterol bomb. They’d had breakfast back in London, too, but as the road signs had started to portend BIRMINGHAM, her stomach started churning, and by the time they’d reached Warwick Services, it had felt completely empty or at least gnawing in some other way that made eating fifteen quid’s worth of Burger King seem like a good idea. Whoppers, milkshakes, the works – no section of the menu overlooked. Now she had stomach ache and she felt sick.

Across the table, Lennie’s stomach was a toddler-style pot under her Blondie T-shirt. She put her hands on it and grimaced. ‘Ugh. I feel like I’ve swallowed a sofa cushion. Full of grease.’

‘It was a two-seater. I got the fluff and loose change from down the back, too.’

Lennie laughed and for a moment, everything seemed brighter. There was still a chance this would all be irrelevant in the grand scheme, wasn’t there? A blip. Once, on one of the long nights when Lennie was a baby, she’d whispered in her ear that together, they could do anything. She would do anything for her, of course; but also, because of her, she, Robin, could do anything. Right, said a snide voice.

She stood quickly and began piling their rubbish onto the trays, crushing her burger box with a savagery that startled Lennie from her texting. ‘Once more unto the breach?’

A thump, hard but fleshy, as if a large bird – a pheasant, even a swan – had dropped from the sky and landed deadweight on the roof. They both jumped but a second later a smirking face loomed at the passenger-side window. For the love of god. Robin took a long breath then pressed the button to lower the glass.

‘Luke.’

Her own eyes looked back from a face that was her own, too, but pale and more defined, the jaw made square by pads of muscle. ‘Shocked you, did I? What are you doing sitting back here? There’s a parking spot outside.’

‘Someone must have just gone.’

Her brother made the yeah, right expression he’d been giving her since he was six. ‘How are you, Lennie? Can’t be many people who’ve staked out their own grandparents. Old habits dying hard, Rob?’

She flung the door open and moved to get out, remembering at the last second that she’d undone her jeans. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Same as you – come to spend time with the rentals. Though just the afternoon in our case.’ He smirked again.

Robin came round to the pavement and stooped to look at the roof. She couldn’t see a dent, but still. ‘Why would you hit my car, you … fuckwit?’ she hissed.

‘Afraid it’ll affect the resale value? What?’ The injured innocence he did so well. ‘You’re going to have to sell it, aren’t you, if you’re as broke as Mum says? Can’t drive an Audi if you’re begging. Even if it was second-hand.’

‘We’re not begging.’ She glanced at Lennie, just getting out, then glared at him: Watch it.

‘Would you be back here if you weren’t?’

‘Hiya, Lennie. Robin.’ Natalie, Luke’s wife, lunged at them. She was like a newly hatched bird, Robin thought, all beak, eyes and pushy hunger, thrusting herself into the middle of every situation to ensure she wasn’t overlooked or slighted in some other unguessable way. Her fringe absorbed make-up from her forehead and hung in damp-looking, fresh-from-the-egg strands.

‘Right.’ Robin opened the boot. ‘Since you’re here, Luke, make yourself useful.’ She handed him a box. ‘It’s only light.’ She wasn’t going to give him an excuse to put his back out and malinger with his PlayStation for weeks. ‘Natalie, have you got a spare hand? It’s just a bag of—’

‘Sorry.’ She held up a set of lilac claws. ‘I’ve just had my nails done.’

On balance, Robin thought as she locked the car, Luke had done her a favour accosting her out here. Better to have the opening skirmish under her belt than walk into an ambush. And being pissed off was useful, armour of a sort. She’d thought she was over the worst but as she’d turned into Dunnington Road, she’d felt a moment of suffocating panic. Here it all was again, as if the sixteen years in between had just fallen away – collapsed: the pairs of Fifties semis facing off across the wide street, their bay windows netted prissily against anyone who could be bothered to peer over the rosebushes or the brace of mid-range saloons in the tiny front gardens. It was all so low-rise, so stunted: nothing reached higher than two storeys. The sky yawned overhead for bleak white acres, uninterrupted. She was seized by a sense of personal jeopardy, actual threat: if she was under it too long, exposed, it would suck out her soul.

As they rounded Terry Willett’s white Ford Transit – the bane of her mother’s existence, herself aside, for twenty-five years – she saw number 17 for the first time and waiting in the ground-floor bay, trapped like a bug between glass and net curtain, her dad. She watched him light up like he’d heard it was Christmas. In a whisk of nylon lace he was gone. ‘Chrissie,’ she imagined him bellowing, ‘they’re here!’

Seconds later, the outer porch door opened. Lennie ran to him, the bag bumping against her back. ‘Hello, sweetheart.’ He held her away to look at her. ‘You’ve grown again, haven’t you? Who said you could do that?’ He lowered his voice. ‘I’ve got some Creme Eggs in for you – we’ll have one after lunch.’

Lunch.

Lennie turned, eyes wide. Robin shook her head: Say nothing.

They could smell it now, the scent wafting through the open door: roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, gravy, carrots, sprouts, peas and god knows what else. Shit. Why hadn’t her mother said something? No – why hadn’t she known? Of course she was going to cook the fatted calf. And that was why Luke and Natalie were here, wasn’t it? Luke wouldn’t drive five minutes to see her but he’d never miss a free lunch.

Over Natalie’s head, her dad winked. When the others had moved inside, he took her bags then pulled her into a hug, crushing her face into his sweater. His smell, it never changed: Ariel detergent, Camay soap and, faint but unmistakeable, the stealthy cigarettes that he disappeared off to smoke twice a day and still believed her mother knew nothing about. Her ribcage buckled as he gave her a final squeeze. ‘Good to have you back, love.’

‘I knew you’d be later than you said so I aimed for three o’clock and it’s a good job I did, isn’t it? Was there traffic?’ Christine slid the potatoes back into the oven, straightened up and retied the apron over her cream blouse and floral skirt. The pattern was yellow roses, not unlike the one on the oven gloves, the blinds and the covered stools. Robin felt like a biker crashing the Women’s Institute garden party.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Hello.’ Christine touched her cheek briefly to hers. ‘I’ll get the greens going now you’re here. So was there?’

‘What?’

‘Traffic.’

Robin glanced at Lennie. A couple of minutes ago, when she was bringing in her suitcase, Lennie had come racing out of the house to tell her there were starters – ‘Cheese soufflé!’ – and pudding, too. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Nothing. And not a word.’

‘But …’

‘We eat. Just do your best.’

The tea towels, Robin noticed, had the roses, too. ‘It was pretty busy,’ she said. ‘Especially round the Oxford turn.’ Before the epic Burger King, they’d had several goes at catching a stuffed pink alligator with a mechanical claw, and they’d lingered round the books in Smith’s so long they’d attracted the security guard.

‘It’s normally worse going into London, isn’t it?’ Christine said, sorting broccoli florets into portions. ‘How nice, to have Elena here.’ She turned and gave her a side-hug. ‘Now, the boys are having a beer, Robin, and there’s lemonade.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Natalie’s not drinking at the moment but don’t make a song and dance about it.’

‘Really? The thinnest woman in the West Midlands? Is she on another diet?’

‘Sssh. They’re trying again. Don’t say anything.’

‘Trying what?’ Lennie whispered.

‘To have a baby.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have you got a drink, Mum?’ Robin asked.

‘I’m going to have a spritzer once everything’s on the table. Would you like one?’

‘No, thanks, I’ll have one of these.’ She picked up a beer from the cluster on the end of the counter. ‘Purity? I haven’t seen this before.’

‘It’s local – the brewery’s out near Studley, I think. Your father likes it.’

Robin flipped off the cap and took a sip. ‘Yeah, I can see why. What?’

‘At least use a glass. And take that jacket off before we sit down, please. And those boots. You look like …’

She couldn’t help herself. ‘A dyke?’

Christine suppressed a shudder. ‘Like you’re going yomping across the Falklands.’

They managed the soufflés without major incident. As he’d pulled out her chair, her dad had murmured, ‘Don’t have a fight, will you? For your mother’s sake,’ and he’d done his best, steering the conversation towards such anodyne topics as the decking that Natalie and Luke were laying in their garden – or rather Natalie’s brother was relaying, Luke having botched it – and the restaurant in Moseley where they’d been for their anniversary, which now had a Michelin star, apparently.

‘A Michelin star in Birmingham – who’da thunk it?’ Robin said.

‘Actually,’ said Natalie, tight-lipped, ‘there’s five.’

The main course proved a bridge too far. The temperature in the room seemed to be rising, the oxygen level decreasing in inverse proportion. Robin had had the same piece of beef in her mouth for a minute but her stomach was drum-taut, painful when it met the table-edge. Glancing to her right, she saw Lennie – genius! – disappear a roast potato into a piece of kitchen roll on her lap. She pushed back her chair to go and get a piece for herself but Luke, obviously afraid of losing his sitting target, cut Dennis off mid-sentence.

‘So, Robin,’ he said, ‘Mum and Dad told me, obviously, but I’m still having problems getting my head around your … situation.’

‘Which part is troubling you?’

‘Well, for a start, how did you actually get fired? We thought, me and Nat, that you were some sort of golden girl down there, the great white hope of Scotland Yard.’ They looked at each other, struggling not to snicker.

‘Luke,’ warned Dennis.

‘What? I’m trying to understand.’

In another situation – any situation with no Lennie – she’d grab him by the collar and bounce his head off the wall. He’d done it to her enough times when his two-year advantage still counted. But then she’d turned eleven and knocked one of his front teeth out and that had been the end of it. The beatings, anyway.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘in layman’s terms, to help you get your head around it, my boss wanted to charge a bad man with a murder he didn’t commit just because he was bad and the public would be better off if he was inside, but I didn’t think it was right, so I said so and he – my boss – didn’t like it.’

‘And you got fired for that?’

‘Yes. They’re quite hot on insubordination in the police. I’m guessing it’s not such a big deal at Carphone Warehouse. Or is it T-Mobile these days?’

‘Robin.’ Dennis put a hand on her arm, calming or admonitory, she wasn’t sure.

‘But from what Mum told me,’ Luke said, ‘it wasn’t just that your boss didn’t like it. The guy – the bad man,’ he made a face that Robin yearned to plunge her fist into, ‘has gone AWOL, hasn’t he? So he’s out there somewhere, a known killer, because of you.’

‘He didn’t do it.’

‘But you don’t know that.’

‘I didn’t have evidence to prove it – I needed more time – but I’m pretty sure.’

‘And that’s enough, is it? The great Robin Lyons says so? “Oh, I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it, let him go – oh look, he’s killed someone else, that’s a shame.”’

‘Beyond reasonable doubt – heard of that? You can’t just lock people up because you think they’re bad apples.’

‘I don’t know why not,’ said Christine. ‘That always seems like a good idea to me. Put them away before they can do the damage.’

Robin gave herself credit for not rising. Even a couple of years ago, she wouldn’t have been able to let that pass.

‘But, sorry,’ Natalie took a prim sip of her water, ‘if you really were highly thought of’ – Princess Di eyes over the rim of the glass – ‘would one thing like that be enough to get you fired?’

‘Ah, that’s the bit she’s not telling us, isn’t it?’ Luke grinned. ‘It wasn’t just one thing – she was on a written warning before. She’s been busting that poor guy’s balls from the moment he started there. This was just the final straw.’

‘Language.’

‘Sorry, Mum, but I’m right, aren’t I? She couldn’t keep her mouth shut and this is what happened. With Adrian, too, I bet – no wonder he dumped her. That poor bas—’

‘Luke!’

A moment of seething silence in which Robin could sense Lennie gathering herself. She put her hand out – Don’t – but it was too late. ‘Ade loves Mum,’ Lennie said, voice tight. ‘He asked her to marry him.’

‘Len, it’s okay. You don’t—’

‘But it’s true. You were the one who said no so even if you had a fight, it doesn’t change that, does it?’

‘He asked you to marry him?’ Christine was staring. ‘And you said no? For god’s sake, why?’

‘Because I couldn’t … I just didn’t …’

‘Oh, you,’ her mother cried, ‘you, you, you. What about anyone else? What about poor Elena? Do you ever give her a second’s thought in all this, when you’re going around acting like you’re—’

‘What? How could you even—’

‘Robin – be quiet. Christine.’ Dennis had his hands out to the sides, boxing-ref style.

Her mother closed her eyes against the cruelty of the world, and the burden it had put upon her.

‘I’m fine, Gran,’ Lennie said. ‘Honestly.’

A hiatus, this time ended by Natalie. ‘So how long will you be here then? Your dad said you’re going to work for Maggie Hammond. That doesn’t mean you’re going to stay, does it?’

‘No.’ Please fucking god. ‘Maggie’s got a lot on so I’m going to help her until I straighten things out at the Met.’

‘Doesn’t she work for the council?’

‘She’s self-employed, they’re just one of her clients. It’s not just benefit fraud; there’s suspect insurance claims and—’

‘From Homicide Command in London to catching scroungers on the sick in Sparkhill,’ crowed Luke. ‘How the mighty have fallen.’

‘Luke, for the last time,’ said Dennis.

Cheeks flaming, Robin stood up. Blood pulsed in the backs of her hands. ‘Better to have fallen than to never even have tried to stand on your own two feet. You …’ The swirl of words and arguments and fury bottlenecked in her throat – she couldn’t choke them out. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she managed. ‘Just …’ She remembered Lennie. ‘Bugger off.’

She swung out of the room and took the stairs two at a time, her mother jabbering away behind her, a diatribe unchanged in twenty years: ‘I won’t have that language in this house; this is my home; I won’t have her behaving like this, Dennis; I just won’t.’

Robin slammed the bedroom door as she’d done a thousand times before, the wall shuddering as it always had. Sudden silence – after a few seconds she could hear herself breathing. She looked around and felt time judder to a stop.

Apart from the boxes behind the door, which Josh had sent the factory’s van to collect from London last week, the room was unchanged since the day she’d packed her bags for university sixteen years earlier. The same blue gingham curtains, chosen by Christine as gender-neutral and successfully, to be fair, given that she and Luke had both hated them; the same pale blue carpet with – yes – the old stain where she’d dropped a leaky ballpoint and deliberately left it. Free-standing wardrobe in white vinyl veneer, the side that abutted the tiny desk still covered with her brother’s Villa stickers circa 1994 and her own picture of Robert Smith in his heyday, all leather jacket and Scissorhands hair.

A vibration in her back pocket. Gid? She’d texted him from Warwick Services, not because she expected anything new today – he wouldn’t be at work; he’d be home with Efie and the boys watching football, cooking, regrouting the bathroom – but for morale, the feeling that on this shittiest of days she still had a line back. Hope.

Not Gid but Corinna: How’s it going over there? What’s the body count?

She thumbed a reply: Nil – for now. Waiting til Amazon deliver acid for bath.

Seconds later, Good thinking. Booze/takeaway/debrief at ours Tues eve? Tell Len Peter has new Xbox game he’s dying to show her.

Wilco and YES. Feed me gin. By the pint.

She slid the phone back into her pocket feeling fractionally better. Corinna the human night-light. When she’d come down to London last month, Robin’d gone to meet her at Marylebone. She’d looked like a beacon as she’d stalked down the platform in her tangerine canvas coat with its fern-print pattern. Black polo neck, indigo skinny jeans tucked into shiny black knee boots – even Rin’s hair had been kinetic that day, cut into a new bob that seemed in perpetual motion.

Len had had a sleepover at her friend Olivia’s house, and so they’d got hammered, absolutely wasted, Robin swinging between rage, incredulity and grief, Rin listening, matching her drink for drink. The next day, they’d staggered up the road like Mick and Keith and eaten their way through spring rolls and meatballs and Vietnamese curry in an effort to staunch the nausea. Afterwards Corinna had done her thing, advising and problem-solving in a way that, coming from anyone else, would have driven Robin round the effing twist. ‘You’ve started looking for your own place?’ she’d said.

‘Online, yeah.’

‘Want me to help? I can while away a dull hour at work on Rightmove.’

‘It’ll have to wait for a couple of months.’

‘Why?’

‘No deposit.’

Corinna had frowned. ‘What do they ask for, a month’s rent? Or a month and a half? Can you take it out of savings? It’s worth it, isn’t it, even if there’s a penalty for early withdrawal?’

‘If it was just a question of taking it out of savings, do you think I’d be moving back? I’m flattered you think I even have a savings account – how long have you known me?’ She’d watched it dawn on Rin that she wasn’t joking, then the volley of silent questions: hadn’t she had a steady job for years? A salary, not massive but solid? ‘My rent here’s a ton,’ she said, ‘and Lennie’s school, even with the scholarship. Then there’ll be a lot of other stuff – you know, moving. A storage locker, maybe.’

‘How much will that cost?’

‘Also, I had some parking tickets.’ She’d hesitated. ‘Which I hadn’t paid, so they’d doubled. Twice. And then there’s the credit cards …’

‘Robin!’

‘I know, I know, I’m an idiot – tell me something I don’t know. The lottery numbers, preferably.’

‘Can I lend it to you? No, don’t get funny, I’d like to. I’ll even charge you interest if it would make you feel better.’

‘No. Thanks but no. I got myself into this mess, I’ll get myself out of it. What I really need you to do is rewind the clock. Make me nineteen again, will you, so I haven’t screwed up my life yet.’

‘You haven’t.’

‘It’s different this time.’ As she said the words, she’d felt them settle on her shoulders like a lead poncho. ‘I haven’t lost my job before, have I? We know I’m relationship poison but I’ve always been able to count on the rest. Work.’

‘You managed before.’ Subtly, Corinna had tipped her head at the next table where a man of about forty moved an expensive-looking pram back and forth with his foot. Going by his wife’s hollow eyes and limp hair, Robin had guessed their baby was weeks old, even days, this one of their first tentative forays back out into the world. Corinna had done that for her, too, back then, broken her circuit between the crib, the changing table and her thesis, and taken her out, to places like this, to the park, a pub by the river. On the surface, the world had looked exactly the same but for her, it had been reconfigured, fundamentally changed. A bomb had gone off in her life, she’d thought, and no one except Corinna had heard a thing.

‘You made a success out of a tough situation,’ she’d said.

‘Yeah, well, this time I’ve done the opposite, haven’t I?’

Back in her childhood bedroom, Robin felt a bead of sweat run between her breasts. Christine had finally got the full set of replacement windows she’d been craving and the room was nursing-home hot. Going over, she shoved one open. Like punching the lid off a Tupperware box. She sucked in as much air as her swollen stomach allowed. Below, dull little portions of garden stretched away on either side, rectangles of winter grass and anonymous shrubs, Homebase panel fencing. The Richardses, their immediate neighbours, had a Little Tikes slide and sandbox in chunky red-and-yellow plastic that confused her until she remembered her mother saying that Karen had ‘given John and Brenda grandchildren’. The right way, Robin had heard: house bought; wedding reception at a hotel in Solihull; tiny feet only thereafter. Rather than too young, out of wedlock, father never disclosed. Not so much given as foisted.

She turned and faced the bunk beds – the fact of the bunk beds. Back then, Luke used to lean over the side and flick snot-balls between the rungs of the ladder as she was falling asleep; now, at the age of thirty-five, she was going to share the beds with her daughter. Everything she’d struggled for in her adult life lay in pieces around her – how had it happened? How the fuck was she going to sort it out?

Chapter Two

If you were really on the edge – and who was to say she wasn’t? – a wet February morning on an industrial estate in Stirchley might be enough to tip you over. Beyond the windscreen, a leaking grey sky bulged over a huddle of building-supply megastores and a near-empty car park, stacks of lumber, sodden nylon holdalls of shingle and sharp sand. In the twenty minutes they’d been here, they’d seen two people, and one of those had been a member of staff pulling a trolley out of the scrubby hedge in front of Toolstation. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. At this hour on a Monday morning her Murder Investigation team would be at full hum, the insect chatter of keyboards and phones stopping only when Freshwater, in all his ferrety majesty, swept in for the briefing, clutching the Starbucks cup he thought made him look au courant and dynamically caffeinated. She felt a swell of deep-tissue yearning that she quickly suppressed. She’d check in with Gid again later, see if anything new had come up.

The wipers made a grudging sweep of the windscreen and Maggie shifted, sending over another waft of her spicy perfume. Shalimar, was it, or Opium? Robin couldn’t remember. At this stage, it was basically her essence, anyway – getting into the car this morning, she’d breathed it in and felt a wave of comfort. Maggie was solid, unchanged in the thirty-five years she’d known her, from the eyeliner and jet-black hair, once natural, now courtesy of L’Oréal, to the revolving collection of chunky silver jewellery set with tiger’s eye and turquoise that she bought on her regular tanning trips to the Greek Islands. She looked less like a private detective, Robin always thought, than a pier-end palm reader, but likely that worked in her favour – who would suspect?

An hour ago, she’d swung her silver Ford Focus away from the kerb at St Saviour’s like they were Thelma and Louise. They’d started late so Robin could walk Lennie to school on her first day but normal kick-off could be six o’clock, or earlier. ‘Cul-de-sacs at dawn, basically,’ Maggie’d said. ‘Shots of people up bright and early, suited and booted and slinging their briefcase/toolbox in the back of the car/van, delete as applicable, are of the essence.’ She’d indicated right at a Tudorbethan pub strung with banners boasting Sky Sports and Gut Buster Burgers. ‘How did Lennie go off?’

‘Okay. I think. Nervous but putting a brave face on. You know what she’s like.’

After she’d turned the light off last night, she’d listened to her daughter flipping around overhead, the slats of the bunk creaking under her weight like a flight of arthritic stairs. ‘Are you all right up there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Comfortable?’

A pause. ‘It’s kind of weird being this close to the ceiling.’

Two or three minutes had passed, another couple of all-body adjustments. ‘Mum?’ Not much more than a whisper this time. ‘I’m sorry I said that about Ade earlier. Sorry I got Gran on your case, I mean, not that I said it. I didn’t like it when Uncle Luke said that about him.’

Uncle Luke’s a cretin, Len – oh, the temptation. ‘I know,’ she said.

A minute or so; another revolution. ‘Mum?’

‘Hm?’

‘You know when you spoke to Ms Brampton? She said I could go back to RPG, didn’t she, when we move back to London?’

‘As long as they have a free place, she said, it’s yours.’

Another pause. She could almost hear Lennie’s mind whirring in the dark.

‘Do you think it’s going to be really different at St Saviour’s?’

No, no, no, my love, it’ll be just the same, just as cosy and sheltered and academically rigorous, and everyone will want to be friends with you straight away. ‘A bit,’ she said. ‘It’s a comprehensive and the area’s not very well off. There’ll be kids there from some tough backgrounds – and boys, obviously. But you’ll be fine wherever you go.’

‘You think so?’

The neediness, so rare coming from Lennie, had been a dart in her chest. ‘Yes. I do. And like we discussed, it’s not forever.’ Please god, let it not be forever.

Next to her now, Maggie snapped to attention. ‘Look lively,’ she murmured as a trolley loaded with sacks of cement nosed through the shop’s automatic doors, pushed by a man currently suing his employers for a work-related back injury. When he wasn’t doing hard physical labour, Robin thought, he must be spending most of his sick leave on the bench press: encased in sportswear, his upper arms looked like Christmas hams. Amazing how bloody stupid people could be.

Maggie waited until she had a straight shot of his face and then, under the guise of texting, took a volley of photographs. ‘We’ll get some of him loading the van,’ she muttered, ‘and Bob’s your uncle. Like shooting fish in a barrel, this one. Here, take this.’ She passed Robin the phone then sat forward to turn on the engine. ‘I’ll go round behind him on the way out so you get a clear view. Then we’ll wait a few minutes and drive over to the site.’

‘Iced buns,’ Maggie said as she dropped her outside Greggs. ‘Get a whole pack. And here,’ she pulled a twenty from her purse, ‘get some sausage rolls as well, or whatever you fancy for lunch. We might not have a chance later.’

Robin waved her away. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ Maggie reached over and stuffed the note into her pocket. Robin tried not to look relieved.

Inside, she joined the queue. It was mid-morning, lunchtime a way off yet, but the place was already busy, two tills going, a steady stream of customers, nasal-musical Brummie accents dipping and rising around her like carousel ponies. She had the accent herself though she’d never given it much thought until Isobel-from-Berkshire laughed at it in her first week at UCL. It was lighter these days, anyway, after a decade and a half away.

Isobel – god, when was the last time she’d thought about her? But the whole morning had been like that, an extended hobble down Memory Lane. Every time they turned a corner there was something else: the community centre where she’d been forced to do ballet; the bus stop for school; the wooden arch to John Morris Jones Walkway down which she and Corinna had disappeared to do their underage smoking. The same but different. The little precinct at the roundabout but the shops had changed. Gardens had been overhauled, extensions added. Instantly recognized, deeply known, but foreign. Even the general look of the place, the style – years in London had altered her aesthetic.

The déjà vu had started the moment she’d opened her eyes and seen Lennie’s new school uniform looming on its hanger like the Ghost of Christmas Past. She’d been at Camp Hill, the grammar school herself, but for a couple of months when she was sixteen, after they were introduced by a mutual friend, she’d gone out with the baddest of St Saviour’s bad boys, Sean Harvey. When he asked her, she’d said yes because she knew it would piss Christine off and because, let’s face it, he was fit and she was shallow, but she’d grown quite fond of his rebel heart and precocious sexual talent. He’d dumped her after she got her GCSE results – apparently her A-stars had been an embarrassment to him. Given her current luck, she thought, she’d probably find herself sitting in a cul-de-sac outside his house before too long.

Catching scroungers on the sick in Sparkhill. How the mighty have fallen.

‘The site’ just now had been a semi-detached in Bournville where the Christmas Ham, real name Barry Perkins, was working cash-in-hand on a kitchen extension and where they’d filmed him tossing the sacks of cement out of his van like confetti. The client was Hargreaves & Partners, a local law firm acting for Perkins’ legitimate boss. She had quite a bit with them at the moment, Maggie said, and another bigger firm, too, on top of her long-standing contract with the city for suspect disability and unemployment claims. With Luke’s comments ringing in her ears, Robin had listened to the list and felt her soul wither.

‘Foive pound seventy-foive, bab,’ said the woman behind the counter.

Back in the car, Maggie ate a sausage roll in four bites then pulled off again.

Robin buckled her seatbelt. ‘Where to now?’

Sparkhill, just north of her parents’ in Hall Green, was almost entirely Asian, which was why Luke, the bigot, had reflexively chosen it for his scroungers. The shops and restaurants on Stratford Road were a mix of Balti houses and halal butchers, travel agencies and bakeries, the windows of the clothing stores full of salwar kameez and Pakistani suits in jewel-box colours. Maggie turned off by a Sikh temple Robin didn’t remember having seen before. Three storeys high with reflective windows trimmed with blue, it looked more like a call centre than a place of worship. Its red brick was the only thing it had in common with the rest of the street, a shabby collection of Victorian terraced workers’ cottages.

Stratford Road had been buzzing but just a few hundred yards off the main drag, the pavement was deserted bar a single elderly woman wearing an anorak over her sari. The houses had a dormant air, the only indication that anyone in them was awake – or even alive – the flicker of television through a ground-floor window.

Maggie brushed pastry flakes off her trousers. ‘Right. Time to come clean.’

‘About what?’

She laughed. ‘Your face! Relax, will you, I mean me, not you. There’s something I haven’t told you about the job.’

‘What?’

‘Obviously I trust you, it wasn’t that, but I’ve always worked strictly need-to-know on this side of things and because this is probably short-term, you and me, I didn’t know if it’d come up. Also, the fraud’s eighty-five, ninety per cent of my work, so you had to be all right with that. I mean, obviously you’re not going to be thrilled, are you, going from Homicide Command to hanging round Wickes’ car park waiting for scumbags. They’re hardly criminal masterminds, Barry Perkins and his ilk.’

‘Maggie. You know I’d be buggered without this. Without you having offered me a job.’ It wasn’t just the money, she thought; if she’d had to spend another day without doing something, belonging to the world of people who had somewhere to be, work to do, she might actually have gone insane.

‘Oh, stop, I don’t need gratitude.’ Maggie pointed at the bag at Robin’s feet. ‘Pass me those, will you?’ She took the pack of iced buns and pulled one out. The floor heaters had loosened the slab of icing, which slipped sideways across the top like an ill-fitting toupee. Her mouth encompassed the thing without it even touching her lipstick.

‘Anyway, I’ve got a bit of a bone to throw you. It’s hardly Interpol but I do some work for women in tight spots,’ she said. ‘Sometimes just helping them sort a problem, sometimes it’s more serious. You can start off expecting one thing and it’s actually something totally different.’ She took another bite. ‘Like, last year, I had a bigamist. His second wife came to me, she had no idea, just knew something wasn’t right. I poked around a bit and that was it. I found him in the Peak District eventually with a whole other family: three kids, cocker spaniel, the lot.’

‘So it’s personal fraud work?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Not really. Sometimes. It’s all sorts. I’ve had girls about to be sent overseas for marriages arranged by “uncles” who’d basically sold them as British passports – those both came word-of-mouth. One of them lived just round the corner from here, other side of Stratford Road. Her mother was the client – wanted more for her. I got her away, helped set her up elsewhere. Nice girl. She’s in Leeds now, doing a degree – we’re still in touch. I had a girl who was trying to get out of a cult. I’ve also had parents who just wanted to know about their daughter’s dodgy boyfriend. Research.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘As long as I’ve had the business. Since I left the job.’

‘They know?’

‘Of course. And that’s how I get most of the cases. I’ve got a contact – Alan Nuttall, my old DS, DI now – and he rings me if something comes up, a situation where there’s no actual crime, nothing the police can do, or it’s like the bigamist: something’s off and I help find out what. He was prosecuted afterwards, obviously, once it was clear there was a charge to be brought.’

‘You’re a dark horse, Maggie Hammond. I had no idea.’

‘Need-to-know, like I said. And now you do.’

A lot of the Victorian houses Robin knew were Tardis-like, with inner proportions that seemed impossible from the outside, but this one was every bit as small as it had looked from the pavement. Dark, too; there was no fanlight above the front door, and the internal door to the front room was shut, blocking any light that way. As they followed the woman to the kitchen at the back, the phrase ‘down the rabbit hole’ came into her head.

It wasn’t just the lack of light or space, though given her choice of small mammals, Robin thought, she’d say Valerie Woodson was more of a harvest mouse than a White Rabbit. Her shoulders hunched as she scurried ahead of them, and though her colouring was sandy – once-auburn hair fading to an odd peach-grey – her eyes were so dark, they looked like buttons, currants in a bun. Maybe they’d adapted to the conditions.

It was brighter in the kitchen, where she stood dazzled in front of them.

Maggie smiled gently. ‘How about a cuppa?’

The woman spooned Nescafé into mugs Robin recognized as garage giveaways from twenty years ago while Maggie kept up a soft patter about the rain, the lead story in the Post on the table, a pot of snowdrops outside the back door. The kitchen was old but looked-after, the white Formica almost stain-free even as the red plastic handles dated it at warp speed. The fridge was covered with magnets shaped like pizza slices and strawberries, a London bus.

An ‘I heart Devon’ magnet anchored a photograph of Valerie and a girl of fifteen or sixteen. They squinted into the sun, arms around each other, their lop-sided smiles so similar they could only be mother and daughter despite the girl’s extra two or three inches and dark brown hair. She wore denim cut-offs and a turquoise vest top and, unlike her mother – the small visible area of whose shins was the colour of cream cheese – she was tanned. Behind them was a beach, unmistakeably British: windbreakers, buckets and spades, and one egregiously burned fat white back.

‘Torbay,’ said the woman as she carried the mugs to a small table. ‘Five years ago. Six this summer.’ She fetched a third chair from the front room. When they were all sitting down, they were elbow to elbow. Robin moved back a little, let in some air.

At close range, the woman looked ill. Her skin was paper-dry and blotchy, raw around the nostrils from nose-blowing. Her eyes were marbled with pink. When she saw Robin notice how her hands trembled, she moved them quickly under the table as though ashamed of the weakness.

‘She left a message just before eight this morning,’ Maggie had said in the car, ‘Alan gave her my number. I was in the shower, and when I called her back I got voicemail. Phone tag. Anyway, she got hold of me while you were getting the food. Her daughter’s missing, she says, has been for four days. We were in the vicinity so I said we’d come round, talk face to face.’

She sat forward now, silver bangles chiming against the table. ‘So tell us what’s going on, Valerie. As much detail as you can.’

The woman brought her hands back up and wrapped them round her mug as if it were a crystal ball. Plain gold wedding band, no engagement ring. Her nails were unpolished, cut short. In fact, all evidence suggested a complete lack of vanity. Her hair was cut in an unflattering pageboy, and she wore a pilled blue round-neck sweater and the sort of elasticated trousers sold from the back of Sunday supplements. If you saw her on the street, Robin thought, she’d barely register.

‘My daughter’s called Rebecca,’ she said. ‘Becca for short, never Becky – she hates Becky.’ A glimmer of a smile. ‘That’s her on the fridge, obviously. She was sixteen then – we went to Devon after her GCSEs.’

‘So now she’s twenty- …?’ said Robin.

‘Two. Her birthday’s in October.’

‘When did you last see her?’ asked Maggie.

‘Thursday. In the morning, before she went to work. Just before eight, like it always is.’

‘She lives here then? With you?’

Valerie nodded.

‘And have you heard from her at all since? Any calls, emails?’

‘No. Normally she texts me during the day – practical stuff, what’s for dinner – but that day, nothing. Then I found her phone upstairs.’

Robin sensed Maggie shift infinitesimally. ‘Where was it?’

‘On the floor, like she’d put it on the bed and it had fallen off. It was almost hidden by the valance – I called her from the landline down here and heard it ringing but I had to ring again to find it.’

‘How about her purse? Her handbag?’

‘She took those. She’d have needed her Swift card to get on the bus.’

‘And where’s the phone now?’

Valerie stood up and fetched it from the counter, a Samsung Galaxy in a sparkly mint-green case. They looked at it without picking it up.

‘Is it locked?’ said Robin.

Valerie Woodson nodded. ‘I don’t know the code. I’ve tried everything – her birthday, mine, her dad’s.’

‘Her dad is …?’

‘He’s dead. Graeme. He died when she was eight. Cancer.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Maggie.

‘Tell us about Thursday morning.’

‘It was … normal. I’ve been over and over it for anything unusual. She did go to work that day, I know that, because on Friday morning when her bed hadn’t been slept in and I found her phone, I rang the office to check she was okay. I got Roger, her boss, and he said she’d been there all day on Thursday and left as usual.’

‘But she wasn’t there then?’

‘No. He was about to call here, he said.’

‘Where does she work?’

‘In the Jewellery Quarter.’

The Jewellery Quarter. Robin felt a cold hand on the back of her neck.

‘A family silversmith,’ Valerie was saying, ‘Hanley’s. She’s been there since she finished her A-levels; they’ve encouraged her to go on, do book-keeping at college at night so she can take more on.’

‘And has she?’

‘Not yet. She says she will but now there’s the other place so I don’t know when she’d have the time.’

‘The other place?’

Valerie frowned. ‘She’s got a bar job in the city centre, place called The Spot. She’s been there since September. Three nights a week – Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.’

‘You don’t approve?’

‘It would be better to do the evening course, wouldn’t it? But she says she’s saving up for a summer holiday.’

‘Have you looked for her passport?’ asked Robin.

‘Yes. It’s here, still in the drawer with mine.’

‘And have you spoken to anyone at the bar?’ said Maggie.

‘Of course.’ A terse note. The woman heard it and caught herself. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. Just take it steady.’

Valerie exhaled heavily, as if she could breathe out the tension. ‘She wasn’t there that night – she wasn’t supposed to be, she doesn’t do Thursdays. On Friday I called to see if she was in and spoke to the manager. He was annoyed with her for missing her shift, leaving him in the lurch.’

‘Right. And you’ve talked to her friends?’

‘As many as I can. And Jane who she works with at the office. She’s got new friends, though, at The Spot. I don’t know them.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Not at the moment. She broke up with Nick in October and there hasn’t been anyone since, as far as I know.’

‘How about him?’ said Maggie. ‘Nick. How did he take the break-up? His idea or hers?’

‘Hers. Well, he wasn’t pleased, he liked her, but as far as I know, he didn’t push it. There were a few phone calls then he got the message.’

‘How long had they been together?’

‘Four or five months. But I’ve been through all this with the police.’

‘Valerie, do you understand why DI Nuttall says she’s not a high-priority case?’

‘Because of her age – she’s an adult. And because there’s no evidence of anything … untoward.’ She looked down, chin quivering. ‘Violent.’ Robin watched her bring herself under control. ‘She doesn’t have any of the risk factors – she’s not suicidal, she doesn’t self-harm; she’s not an addict; she’s not in an abusive relationship. I understand what he was trying to say – people leave, they don’t want to be found, that’s their prerogative – but this isn’t that. This is different. Something’s wrong, I know it. I know my daughter. If she hasn’t come home and she hasn’t rung …’

‘What’s she like as a person?’ Robin asked. ‘What does she like doing?’

Valerie took a wad of tissue from her cuff and pressed it under her eyes. ‘She likes reading. We used to go to the library a lot when she was younger and it stuck.’

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Novels – all sorts. Historical, thrillers. She likes Jane Eyre – reads it over and over again. Lately she’s been reading a lot of YA, she calls it – young adult. Well, I suppose she is one but it means younger, really, doesn’t it? All teenagers and girls with crossbows. Fantasy. And she likes cooking. Those are hers.’ She pointed to a stack of books on the counter: Ottolenghi and Polpo, two River Cafés. ‘She loves the Bake Off, all those cookery shows on Saturday morning. She watches them then goes shopping down Stratford Road, comes back and cooks. It’s not all my taste, what she makes. Too … herby. Lentils, little beans. What’s that funny stuff – tabbouleh? But she’s good at it.’

‘Wish I was,’ said Maggie.

‘So she’s a homebody, would you say?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. She’s … a mixture. She likes her cooking and her books but if I said she was always sensible … She drinks. She goes out. She’s not a wallflower.’

‘You said she’s not an addict; have you ever suspected she might be taking drugs at all?’ Robin asked.

‘No.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Remember, we’re not police,’ Maggie said. ‘The objective here would be to find Becca, not get her into trouble. Knowing about drugs is for us, to make sure we have the whole picture. We’re not going to go to the police about personal drug use, okay?’

‘Right. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Nothing … serious.’

In the bag at her feet, Maggie’s phone started ringing. ‘I’m sorry, Valerie.’ She took it out, looked at the screen then stood. ‘Will you excuse me a moment?’ She pointed to the hallway. ‘Hello?’ The tinny sound of a male voice on the other end that faded as she moved away.

Valerie Woodson looked at Robin, expectant, and for a moment she was thrown. What now? Her instinct – her training, so ingrained it was second nature at this point – was to get details of Rebecca’s associates, her employers, friends, exes, but how did Maggie work? Did she have to agree formally to take on the case? Did she want to? Writing down names would look like a commitment. And what about Valerie’s side of it – was there some kind of contract? A fee? What were Maggie’s terms?

She played for time. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Since I was born,’ Valerie said. ‘I’m the only original Brit on the street now. My parents bought the house in the Fifties, I’ve never lived anywhere else. My dad retired about the time I met Graeme and we bought it from them. They moved out to Worcestershire, bought a bungalow near Inkberrow.’

‘Nice.’ Jesus, the idea of living in one house your whole life. ‘Did you ever see any evidence of Rebecca using drugs?’

The non sequitur took Valerie aback, unsurprisingly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Sorry – I mean, have you ever seen her with them? Found them in the house?’

‘Of course not.’ Now she looked indignant. ‘I wouldn’t stand for that.’

Robin glanced back up the hall and saw Maggie open the front door, step out and pull it closed behind her.

Valerie saw, too. ‘Is it something to do with Rebecca?’

‘I don’t think so. No. The police wouldn’t know to call us about her. We’ve only just made contact with you, so …’

‘That’s true. Yes, that’s true. God.’ She put her face in her hands. ‘Sorry. It’s just … Do you have children?’

‘One. A daughter, too.’

‘So you understand.’

‘A little bit, yes. You must be … extremely worried.’ Quick, she thought, deflect the conversation. The last thing she wanted to get into was her life or how she came to be working with Maggie. Her homicide experience wouldn’t be a comfort, either. ‘Where do they go when they’re out, Becca and her friends?’

‘With her old friends, Lucy and Harry, they go – they used to go, before she started at The Spot – to this thing, what’s it called, The Digbeth Dining Club? Street food, she called it, lots of different stands that …’

The front door – Valerie’s head whipped round. Following her gaze, Robin saw Maggie step inside and close it. For a moment, turned away, she seemed to pause. Then, deliberately, she walked back to the kitchen. Her face was oddly composed, un-Maggie-like. Robin tried to meet her eye but found she couldn’t.

‘Valerie,’ Maggie said, ‘I’m sorry but we’re going to have to go. Something’s come up. I’ll ring you as soon as I can. In the next hour or so.’

The woman’s chair shrieked against the floor. ‘What’s happened? It’s Becca, isn’t it?’

‘Becca?’ Maggie seemed confused. ‘Becca – no. No. Robin, can we …?’

Robin stood, her heart starting to beat faster. What the hell? It was there, she wasn’t imagining it, the care with which Maggie said her name. Disorientated, she followed her down the narrow hallway and back outside. The door banged shut behind them. It had started drizzling again while they were inside, she’d seen it through the kitchen window, but now it was properly raining. ‘What’s going on?’

‘In the car.’

The automatic fob flashed the lights. Robin opened the door then hesitated. As she dropped into her seat, she realized she was begging: Please, not Lennie.

Maggie’s door slammed shut. She bowed her head then took a breath. ‘That was Alan Nuttall on the phone.’

Relief, followed immediately by guilt. ‘So it is Rebecca?’

‘No, it’s nothing to do with this. He was calling to see if I knew about something that came in last night.’

Last night – not Lennie. Sheer, exhilarating relief – thank god. ‘So what was it?’

‘There was a house fire in Edgbaston. They’re still looking for the husband – he’s missing. The boy’s injured, badly injured, but alive. The wife … she didn’t make it.’ Maggie reached across the gearstick and took her hand.

Robin stared at Maggie’s giant turquoise ring. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What I’m trying to say … Rob, it’s Corinna.’

Chapter Three

In the raw, disorientated, underground early months of Lennie’s life, Robin had used to wait for Corinna’s key in the door as if they were married. She’d start watching the clock at six, when the shop closed, and she’d imagine where she was now and now and now, picturing her tracking back towards them – the walk up to Notting Hill Gate, the number 94 bus – and then, at last, the rattle of the key, the thud as the carrier bag hit the hall floor. ‘Hello? Lennie? Where’s my favourite girl?’ Normality suddenly, as if it had blown in with Corinna when the door opened. The crushing panic, the waves of What have I done? How the hell am I going to do this? retreated, driven back by a cold bottle of Singha beer from the corner shop and the oven on for jacket potatoes.

To do that for someone. And then – at that age. Even now, years later, Robin thought about it and was amazed. An hour after she’d jumped off the bus hurtling her and the bean that was the start of Lennie towards the appointment at the Marie Stopes clinic, she’d phoned Corinna in Birmingham and by eight o’clock that evening – the first time Robin had ever ordered herself an orange juice at a pub – Rin had been in London, sitting opposite her at the sticky table, stunned but not shocked, not trying to ‘make her see sense’ as Christine had screamed later but talking about how they – they – could make it work.

Over the next few months, Corinna had uprooted her life for them. She’d been on the WHSmith management trainee scheme then and she’d arranged a transfer from the New Street branch to the one on High Street Kensington and, two weeks before Robin’s due date, she’d packed her bags and driven her Ford Fiesta down the M40 to London. She’d lived with them until Lennie was eighteen months old and she’d never once made Robin feel as if she were even doing her a favour. ‘Oh, shurrup,’ she’d said in the Yorkshire accent she put on when dodging anything serious. ‘Helping you? What makes you think I’m not using you? I’d never do this without you – I’m probably going to be in Birmingham forever after this, aren’t I, with Josh and the factory? This is my adventure.’

And sometimes, when she was there and Robin had had a four-hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep, it had felt if not like an adventure, at least not terrifying. Doable. Amid the anxiety – was Lennie getting enough milk? If she rolled in the night, would she suffocate? How was she, Robin, going to afford a child? – there were times when they’d start laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of their being in charge of a baby and not be able to stop. So many things: the way they’d had to take off their jeans to give Lennie a bath because the tub was cracked and leaked onto the floor; Psycho Mike-o from number 14 who’d asked Rin out three times a week; even the snails that came in under the back door overnight and left silvery trails over the grim nylon kitchen carpet. For a year and a half, that flat off Uxbridge Road had been their world, their tatty, semi-subterranean bunker of a world, and now no one else knew about it.

Except Josh, because he’d been there, too, more weekends than not. Though his dad was training him up to run their family business back in the Midlands, most Friday nights he’d arrived on the doorstep in Shepherd’s Bush with a curry – ‘Not the Balti Triangle but it’ll do’ – and stayed ’til Sunday. He’d watched Euro 2004 on their scratchy green sofa, giving Lennie a bottle, and when they’d all gone out together, he’d taken her in the baby carrier, her cheek pressed sideways against his chest, little feet bumping the tops of his thighs. He’d only been twenty-four but if anyone ever thought Lennie was his, he’d never jumped to deny her like some of her other mates had, the ones who’d treated Robin as if she was suddenly a different, mildly contagious person, The Girl Who Got Knocked Up.

The slam of a car door. Lifting her head from her hands, she saw a tall black woman in a three-quarter-length coat on the pavement outside. A second later, as the woman checked her phone, a shiny blue-black head emerged from the driver’s door on the far side. Robin froze.

Riveted, she watched as the man rounded the back of the car. The hair was right, he was Indian or Pakistani, but then he looked up and – oh, thank fuck – she saw that the face underneath it was wrong: too young, too fine-boned, too light. And as he stepped onto the pavement, she saw that he was too short – two or three inches too short, under six feet. She leaned backwards into the cover of the dining-room curtains, heart thudding.

Energetic footsteps on the path, then the four Big Ben notes of the doorbell. Her mother appeared in the archway, eyelids swollen. ‘They’re here, love. Shall I let them in?’

‘I’ll do it.’ The room tilted as she stood, the floor underfoot uncertain. Her body moved as if she were operating it by remote control – left leg, good, now right leg – normal communication between brain and muscles suspended. When Maggie had dropped her back a couple of hours ago, direct from Sparkhill, she’d walked up the front path like the Tin Man, stood with her arms by her sides, thousand-yard staring as Maggie told Christine what had happened.

Through the pebbled glass panel beside the front door now, the shimmering outlines of the police made them apparitions, visitors from another dimension.

‘Robin Lyons?’

DCI, to you.

‘DS Thomas,’ said the woman, showing her ID. ‘We spoke on the phone. This is DC Patel.’ Up close, he looked even younger than he had outside, twenty-five or -six, baby-faced. Thomas wasn’t that much older, early thirties, perhaps her own age, but her vibe was completely different. Meerkat-straight, shoulders back, posture accentuated by the crisp angles of the coat and a pair of black trousers with a sharp centre crease. Her hair was cut short at the sides, the longer top shaped into a wedgy quiff that reminded Robin of Emeli Sandé. Masculine-feminine. Got my shit together, was the message.

‘Come in.’

They followed her to the sitting room where Robin watched the woman look around, taking in the three-piece suite, a patterned aqua monstrosity whose curved backs and fluted arms recalled Botticelli and his giant scallop. It was too big for the space and so the sofa could only go against the wall, making the room look even more corridor-like than it was. Opposite was the tiled fireplace, a vase of dried grasses in the hearth, the Spode figurine of an Edwardian lady with a stupidly large hat on the mantelpiece. The least offensive thing was the gilt-framed watercolour of the Lickey Hills that had been Granny Lyons’.

‘My parents’ house,’ she said, and saw the flicker in the woman’s eyes: at her age? Robin gestured at the furniture. ‘Please, have a seat.’

They took the sofa, leaving her the armchair. If you were curled up in it, feet tucked under, it was okay, shell-like in a good way, even, but sitting properly, Robin was dwarfed by it, shrunk down like Alice in Wonderland, her feet barely skimming the floor. It added to the disorientation, the sense that everything was off-kilter. Unreal.

‘Thanks for talking to us,’ the woman said, pulling out her notebook. ‘As I said on the phone, DI Nuttall gave us your name. Maggie Hammond told him you and Corinna were close.’

‘She was my best friend. Since senior school. She saved my life, I think.’

The woman’s eyebrows went up.

‘Not literally. Maybe literally. I’m a single mother – I got pregnant by accident in my last year at university and she moved down to London, moved in with me. She cooked dinner so I could work, changed nappies, did one of the night feeds if I was about to go insane from lack of sleep. Made it all seem like less of an unholy fuck-up. I don’t know how I would have done it otherwise – I might have lost my mind. I definitely wouldn’t have finished my degree.’

‘Losing her must be tough for you.’

It was a statement but also a question. Unlike her mother, who’d burst into tears the moment she’d heard, she hadn’t cried. There was a fierce pressure in her chest but she couldn’t get to it mentally, couldn’t translate it. ‘I haven’t begun to process it,’ she said. ‘I know but I don’t know. I saw her three weeks ago – I was texting with her yesterday. Lennie – that’s my daughter – we were supposed to go over there tomorrow night for dinner.’ As she said it, she realized that even that, that small bright spot on the immediate horizon, had been extinguished. And there would be no more.

‘What time were you texting?’

‘Afternoon.’ Robin checked her phone. ‘Just after four – eight minutes past. My last reply to her at four ten.’ Last.

‘What were the texts about? How did she sound?’

‘Fine, normal. Herself. I mean, she didn’t mention herself. She was checking in on me – I only moved back here yesterday, she knew I … had reservations.’

‘You moved yesterday?’ Patel looked up from his notebook.

‘Yes. From London.’

DS Thomas nodded, glanced at him: Make a note. ‘How much do you know about what happened?’

‘Almost nothing. That there was a fire at their house. Corinna’s dead.’ She heard herself say the words as if from across the room. ‘Maggie said Peter’s badly injured. And Josh’s missing – what does that mean? Are you waiting for a formal ID?’ She felt a wave of nausea at the thought of dental records, a body so badly burned that they couldn’t be sure it was him – or even a man. She’d seen those: blackened, pink-shiny lumps of flesh, the features, genitals burned away.

DC Patel – Baby Cop – shot a sideways look at Thomas, who leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. ‘It’s very early, obviously, but as things stand, our priority is locating Mr Legge.’

‘Locating?’

‘We’ve only found Mrs Legge’s body. And Mr Legge’s car is missing,’ said Patel.

It took her a moment but then relief flooded through her: Josh hadn’t been there. He hadn’t been at the house. If Peter recovered – when he did – he’d have at least one parent. Thank god – thank god. ‘He wasn’t there?’

Another sideways glance from Baby Cop, missed or at any rate unacknowledged by the woman, whose eyes were trained instead on Robin’s face. ‘Again, to be clear, it’s early,’ she said. ‘Lines of enquiry are wide open and we’re still waiting on the Fire Investigator, SOCO, but even without their reports … There’s evidence of an accelerant at the scene. The fire was almost certainly started deliberately.’

‘What?’ An electrical fault, the iron left on – she’d imagined a malevolent spark spitting from the fire, nestling deep among the fibres of Corinna’s sheepskin rug, glowing, taking hold as they slept unwitting upstairs. But – arson?

‘Mr Legge may have killed his wife then set the fire to destroy evidence.’

A sort of bark escaped her. She almost laughed. ‘Josh? You think Josh killed Corinna? That’s … No. There’s no way. No way.’

‘His car is missing,’ said Patel again, as if that settled it.

‘So? He’s a businessman – he travels. He’ll have been away for the night.’ Oh god – it dawned on her that if that was the case, Josh didn’t know. If he was out of contact, no one had reached him, he still had to find out. Rin dead, Peter in hospital – she closed her eyes.

You moved yesterday.

Suddenly Robin stiffened. The floor seemed to shift beneath her chair.

‘We’ve spoken to Mr Legge’s secretary.’ Patel’s voice reached her from a distance. ‘There were no plans for him to be away. But more importantly, the neighbours on both sides reported seeing his car on the drive yesterday evening. Monday is bin day over there – he took their rubbish out after ten last night, spoke to one of them.’

Could it …? Could someone …?

She pressed her hands against her knees to try and stop them shaking. Focus, she told herself, focus. ‘In the extremely unlikely event that Josh, who loved Corinna beyond all reason …’ She faltered, seeing Patel scribble in his pad. ‘I don’t mean literally beyond reason. Just – he loved her. He really loved her. In the event that he had some sort of mental breakdown or psychotic episode – again, extremely unlikely – and killed her in a moment of madness, there’s no way he would have hurt Peter.’

‘Do you know how Peter sustained his injuries?’ Thomas this time.

‘No. But fire – smoke inhalation, burns?’

‘Inhalation, yes, but actually the worst of his injuries came from the fall.’

‘He fell?’

‘He jumped. Into the back garden from a skylight on the second floor. Broken legs, pelvis and three ribs, one of which punctured his left lung.’

Robin covered her mouth.

‘We haven’t been able to talk to him, he’s unconscious, but he was wearing pyjamas so our guess is he was asleep and woke to discover the fire, jumped to escape.’

She thought of him at Christmas the year before last. They’d spent it in Edgbaston with Corinna and Josh. It had worked really well; they’d all had proper time together, and Len had made trips over here to see her grandparents. In the evenings, after Josh had got him into his PJs, Peter had come to the dining table to say goodnight. Those legs – in tight jersey bottoms printed with aliens and flying saucers, they’d been long and spindly as breadsticks. She’d looked at Corinna, who’d folded her lips together to contain the laugh, the I know, it’s too much of maternal love.

‘It’s an hypothesis – a theory,’ said Patel.

She gave him a look: I know what a fucking hypothesis is.

‘That having killed his wife in the heat of the moment, Mr Legge came to himself, realized what he’d done and knew he couldn’t bear his son to know. But knowing also that he couldn’t actively kill his son – the moment had passed, whatever had led him to kill Mrs Legge – he set the fire not only to destroy evidence but in the hope that his son, who he knew to be asleep upstairs, would die from smoke inhalation without ever waking up.’ He laid it in front of her, formal as a barrister.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not possible.’

‘As Mrs Legge’s closest friend, were you a person she confided in? Shared her secrets with?’ Thomas.

‘Yes, when there were any.’

‘What sort of things would they be?’

Robin took a silent breath, tried to calm the storm in her head. Arson. ‘Rin’s dad was an alcoholic,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t physically violent, nothing like that, but he was useless, Trevor. Worse than. Her mum was basically a single parent when Rin and Will – her brother – were growing up. Oh god – does Di know?’

Thomas nodded.

‘It was the full Monty with him: sleeping rough round the coach station, going AWOL for weeks at a time, getting beaten up. Lost his teeth. Mrs Pascoe brought up Rin and Will on her own and she’s a nurse so they never had much money. It’s why Rin didn’t go to uni – she was more than capable, she was with me at the grammar school, she got two As and a B at A-level. She wanted to start earning straight away, though, help her mother.’ She remembered Corinna walking out of the British Heart Foundation in town, that Yorkshire accent: ‘You know what, pet? I’ve ’ad it up to me neck with cast-offs. Time to get a job.’

‘How about more recently than that? Was there anything on her mind? Anything worrying her?’

Robin tried to think. ‘No. Nothing that would even remotely … They would have liked another baby.’

‘But they didn’t?’

‘She had a difficult time with Peter – placenta praevia. He was early, she lost a lot of blood. It was Josh who was most afraid of going through that again – losing her.’

Another little note in Patel’s book.

‘Did she talk to you about their relationship?’

‘Never negatively. Unless you count joking about how they never had enough sex – too bloody tired after work, being parents, the house, what’s for dinner, you know.’ Maybe they didn’t; Baby Cop was too young and Thomas didn’t look like she’d settle for less than perfection in any area of her life. ‘But it was nothing, just idle talk over a bottle of wine, nothing to do with how much she loved him, which was a lot. They’d been together since she was sixteen.’

‘You never had reason to believe she felt frightened of him?’

‘No.’

‘Did he try to control her at all – dominate her? Did you ever see him behave in a way you’d describe as intimidating?’

The image appeared in her head without warning; she shoved it away.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Generous, protective, kind, yes; controlling, dominating, no.’

‘DI Nuttall contacted Maggie Hammond because he knows she sometimes works with local women experiencing domestic violence.’

‘Maggie knew Corinna but only through me. She wouldn’t have anything different to tell you about Josh. She’d have told me – today if not before.’

‘And what about Corinna herself – the other side? You never had reason to think she might have been bored of the marriage? That there was someone else? They’d been married for …’ Patel flicked back a couple of pages in his notebook, ‘twelve years.’

‘No, she never even hinted at that.’

‘And she would?’

‘Yes.’

‘If she’d met someone else or was thinking of leaving him – for whatever reason – might that be enough to make him lose control? If he loved her as much as you say.’

‘Didn’t happen.’

‘Infidelity can make people react in extreme ways,’ pronounced Patel as if he was whipping back the cloth on a remarkable truth. ‘Not just men, either. Totally normal people can go completely off the deep end and behave in a way no one could predict. It could also explain why Josh would set the fire knowing his son was upstairs – these kinds of killings can be a misguided attempt to keep a family together, in death if not in life.’

‘I’m aware.’

DS Thomas sat back and crossed her legs as if to signal that she was satisfied, the heat was now off. Robin braced herself.

‘You were in the job yourself, weren’t you?’ Thomas said. ‘The Met.’

Here it came.

‘DCI with HMCC.’

‘That’s …?’ Patel, pen poised.

‘Homicide and Major Crime Command. I led a murder investigation team.’ Fifty people.

‘Until quite recently.’ An eyebrow rose towards the Emeli Sandé quiff.

‘Just after Christmas.’

‘You left because …?’

‘I didn’t leave, I was fired.’ Robin looked Thomas in the eye. ‘Misconduct. It was in the papers – Jamie Hinton.’

Thomas nodded and Robin saw that of course she’d known all about it; she’d just wanted to hear her say it. How she’d say it.

‘Tell us about that.’

Robin looked at her. She’d probably read the whole thing on her phone while Patel drove them over here. ‘We – my team – were investigating the murder of a guy called Jay Farrell. Officially, he was a property developer – thirty-three, good-looking, big house in Hammersmith a couple of streets back from the river – but as we discovered, he also had a couple of sidelines, significantly, running illegal parties. Raves. It started with a house he was converting to flats, before the building work, but it was such a success, he started hiring places – barns, a big empty house out in Hertfordshire. Word went out on Facebook and hundreds of people turned up, the Nineties all over again. He charged them entry and sold them drugs – which he’d bought from Jamie Hinton.’

‘Okay.’

‘Hinton’s a career crim – previous for GBH and acquiring criminal property, known gangland ties. A friend of a friend introduced them but they’d become mates themselves. They were very similar – both all about the lifestyle, the clothes, the cars, the girls. When we got Farrell’s phone, there were selfies of them out together at clubs.

‘But then – word is, at least – Hinton was robbed. A big stash of coke and E taken from a house in Richmond – a house Farrell knew about because he’d been there. His body was found in a park on the Thames towpath, tortured in various ways – cigarette burns, lacerations.’

Thomas raised her eyebrows, waiting for the crowd-pleaser.

‘Hands cut off.’

‘He was being punished for stealing?’ Patel.

Top marks. ‘Or so whoever it was wants us to believe. My guv’nor, Detective Superintendent Freshwater,’ she couldn’t quite mask her scorn, ‘wanted me to charge Hinton, but I wouldn’t because I didn’t think he’d done it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Several reasons. They were mates, like I said. They had a good thing going – they were both doing very nicely out of the parties so why kill the golden goose? Also, Hinton’s intelligent. If he had been stolen from, he’s far too clever to advertise either that – Excuse me, officer, someone’s nicked my drugs! – or the fact that he’d murdered the perpetrator. It was a set-up.’

‘But you didn’t have any evidence of that?’ said Thomas.

‘Not as things stood. So I let him go and he promptly went AWOL.’

It occurred to her suddenly that her record might make her less credible, even suspicious. Could they think she was some kind of serial aider and abetter? No, paranoid – get a grip. But even if they thought she was unreliable because of Hinton … ‘Anyway, the dismissal was unfair and I’m going to appeal.’

‘Right,’ said Thomas, neutral. Impossible to judge how she meant it. ‘You were with the Met for thirteen years, yeah, so you know time’s critical? If this is a spousal murder, and that’s the most likely explanation at the moment, whether we like it or not, it’s crucial we find Josh quickly. For his own protection.’

Murder–suicide. In cases where one partner killed the other, he or she frequently killed him or herself afterwards, either straight away, at the scene, or days, even months later.

‘And if something drove him to it,’ said Patel, ‘if she was having an affair or planning to leave him, he could plead loss of control. That’s allowable as a defence. It would be manslaughter, not murder – you would be help—’

‘Jon-Jaques Clinton, 2012,’ Robin said. ‘The Court of Appeal quashed his murder conviction for killing his wife because of the qualifying trigger – she left him for another man, wrote about it on Facebook. They ruled sexual infidelity allowable for a defence of Loss of Control, going against the legislation that had been passed in 2009.’ Teaching her to suck eggs, bloody cheek. Evidently, her right as a woman to be patronized was the one thing that hadn’t expired now she was off the job.

‘Where would he go?’ Thomas now. ‘Anything you can think of. Did he have ties somewhere else? Family? Friends?’

She thought, trying to clear space in her head, but there was nothing. ‘Most of his friends and family are here. There’ll be university mates who moved away after – Josh was at Aston – but a lot stayed local. The Legges are Brummie to the bone, they’ve been here since time immemorial – even the factory’s third or fourth generation.’

‘Is there a place he knows well where he might try to lie low? How about holidays? Did they have somewhere they went back to repeatedly? Somewhere they all loved?’

Did, loved. Past tense. ‘No, not really. They went to Italy and Greece a lot but different places every time. Different islands.’ A wave of frustration. ‘Look, it looks bad, I know, especially the car, but this wasn’t Josh. What other lines are you following?’

‘What other lines should we follow?’

‘Burglary gone wrong.’ Her turn to teach the egg-sucking.

‘Though, of course, most killers are known to their victims.’ Touché.

‘Then some kind of misguided kidnapping attempt. They lived in a biggish house, Josh owned a factory – someone who didn’t know better might have come to the conclusion they’re loaded.’

‘But they’re not?’

‘No. Comfortable, definitely, but not megabucks at all. The factory’s not that big, a lot of the workers are part time. Or maybe they got into some kind of fight – something stupid that just grew until …’

‘Such as?’

‘The sort of thing that could happen to anyone unlucky. Road rage that escalated and the nutter followed them home. Some sort of border dispute about the garden fence that turned nasty.’

‘But there’s nothing like that you know of? Or any other possible motive?’

‘If there were, I’d tell you.’

DS Thomas eyeballed her: would you? Robin felt her cheeks flame but refused to break eye contact. Hold on; hold steady.

Thomas bailed first. ‘Right.’ She glanced at Patel: let’s go. As they stood, Robin realized that neither had taken their coats off.

‘We’ll be in touch,’ Thomas said at the door, ‘but if you do think of anything, call us straight away.’ She handed Robin her card then turned to go. The temperature had plummeted since the morning and the air that came in was freezing. Robin thought of Corinna, her bag of Singha beers and potatoes, the warmth she’d used to carry with her into the flat every night. She stood and watched them as they walked away.

When they reached the car, she shouted, ‘Wait!’

They spun around, expectation written across their faces: she’d remembered something; seen sense; she was going to tell the truth after all.

‘If you haven’t already,’ Robin said, ‘you should speak to Samir Jafferi.’

‘Our guv’nor?’ said Patel.

‘He’s a friend of theirs, too.’

Chapter Four

Rustling overhead then graunching springs. The ladder creaked as feet and calves appeared, just visible in the light round the curtains. Thighs, then the hem of her T-shirt.

Without saying a word, Robin lifted the edge of the duvet and Lennie slipped in next to her. Robin pulled her close, pressed her nose into her hair. Coconut Milk Herbal Essences these days, flavour of the month, but underneath, unchanging, the Lennieness, the smell of her daughter. She breathed it in, animal comfort.

‘I keep thinking about Peter,’ Len whispered. ‘When he wakes up and hears about his mum.’

Robin squeezed tighter, felt her ribcage expand and contract. A cold foot – how, in the Tupperware sweat lodge? – found her shin and pressed against it. The physicality of having a child, and not just in the early days. Of course, at thirteen, Len didn’t cuddle like she used to – for years, when she was two, three, four, if they’d been in the same room, Lennie had been literally on her – but when it mattered, here they were. There’d never been anyone else whose limbs – platonically – she’d been able to tangle hers up in without thinking, unselfconscious. Even Dennis. When he’d come home this afternoon, he’d held her as tightly as she held Lennie now, but she couldn’t let herself go. She’d watched herself standing rigid in his arms, out-of-body.

Maggie had collected Lennie from school while Robin spoke to the police, so Len had already known something was wrong, but her face when she’d told her. She’d stared for a moment, aghast, and then – Robin had grabbed her – it hit home. It was the first time she’d ever lost anyone, the first time Robin had ever had to tell her someone was dead. And here, in a house that wasn’t theirs, in a school uniform that she was wearing for the very first time – that she should never have been wearing at all. ‘I’m so sorry, Len. I’m so sorry.’

She’d sobbed, shoulders shaking. Then, standing away, swiping at her eyes with her sleeve, she’d said, ‘What can we do?’

‘I don’t know, love. I’m thinking. I’m trying to think.’

But her head had crackled with white noise all day. From the moment their car disappeared from view, she’d been waiting for the police to call: they’d made a mistake; Josh had reappeared; been found; there was an explanation for why he’d been doing the bins at ten o’clock but was gone by one thirty when the neighbours called 999. Not a simple explanation, perhaps – as the afternoon ticked past, she’d queasily conceded that – but a reason. Instead, there was radio silence.

Could he have had an accident? But if it’d been serious, the police would almost certainly know. They’d have checked RTIs, hospital admissions. What else? Some kind of health crisis – a heart attack, a stroke? It ran in the family, his father had had one. What if Josh had had a spat with Corinna and driven off in a huff, blood pressure through the roof? If he’d felt ill, he might have pulled over before it happened. If he was parked on the street somewhere or in a car park, no one would think anything of it. He was young – thirty-eight. They’d glance at him and see a guy having a nap.

But someone had set the house on fire.

Not him. Her rejection of Patel’s hypothesis was visceral, straight from the gut: Josh hadn’t killed Corinna, simple as. There were no triggers – Rin hadn’t been cheating or going to leave him, and yes, she would know. But beyond that, even if she had been planning to leave and she’d written a double-page spread about it in the Mail on Sunday, Josh wouldn’t have killed her. He just wouldn’t.

‘Your instincts tell you?’ Freshwater’s voice suddenly, lambent with scorn. ‘Do they?’ He’d been standing behind his desk, fists planted, knuckles white. His shirt strained in lines, neck to armpit, stuffed with mid-life-crisis muscle. Anger shimmered off him but his eyes had been gleaming, too: Gotcha. Here it was at last, the excuse he’d been waiting for. ‘So we’re ignoring the facts – the facts gathered by your team, DCI Lyons – and going with your instincts, instead. What the fuck …?’ His prissy fountain pen jumped in his prissy glass tray. He’d spun around, turning his back as if disgusted. Her instincts said he was hiding his face, trying not to whimper at the pain in his knuckles.

Instinct wasn’t ‘woo-woo woman shit’ – she couldn’t wait to talk about that at her appeal – as any cop worth his salt knew. ‘Read Malcolm Gladwell, you …’ Fuckwit – she’d stopped herself but barely. He’d got the message, though. The next day, she’d ordered him a copy of Blink on Amazon. She knew it had arrived; Gid said he’d seen it on his desk. Instinct was years of lived experience, years of watching people, their words, behaviour, body language, processed in a moment and delivered to your gut as guidance on what you were dealing with, so you could protect yourself. And her instinct told her that Corinna had never had to protect herself from Josh.

An hour ago, she’d lain with her eyes trained on the red digital numbers of the desk clock: 1.30 a.m. A full day since the emergency call, already half – half! – of the first forty-eight hours, the most valuable in a murder enquiry, when everything was freshest: scene, witnesses, investigators. With every hour that passed, the case became cooler, the odds of solving it longer.

Arson.

The lack of information was doing her head in. ‘Evidence of an accelerant’ – what did that mean? A jerry can dropped on the drive, or areas of petrol that had somehow failed to ignite? Was it petrol for the lawnmower, grabbed from the garage on the spur of the moment or had it been brought there, premeditated? Where was Corinna found – which room? Had she been dead before the fire started? If she was badly burned and any existing injuries had been soft-tissue … Veteran of hundreds of crime scenes, gangland executions, shootings, drownings, Robin had run to the bathroom and puked.

She took a deep breath now, made herself exhale slowly. Hidden by the dark, she acknowledged it, the other thing that had bound them together, she, Josh and Corinna, never spoken about but always there, the fuse on everything they’d accomplished since. Had someone found out? Was that possible after all these years? Eighteen years – before Lennie, before Peter, any of it. If so, why now? What had changed?

You moved yesterday.

And she’d been in the papers – someone could have seen the photo, recognized her … No – she ordered herself to stop. That way madness lay; a spiralling nightmare.

There was so much she didn’t know, all of it essential for building a picture of what had happened. The effort it had taken not to ring the number on DS Thomas’s card, try and glean new crumbs. By now, the initial house-to-house would be long done, and the search of the immediate area. They’d be looking at CCTV, checking speed cameras. Anyone driving away from the house had to use either the A38 or Pershore Road and there’d be cameras there – they were both routes in and out of the city centre. The time-window was three and a half hours, ten o’clock to half past one; it wouldn’t take very long to find out what time Josh’s car had left, and in which direction.

Who else would they have spoken to? Di and Will, of course, and they’d have family liaison there. Gerry, Josh’s dad, and his sister, Kath. Poor Gerry – he was fragile anyway since the stroke, and a widower. What would it do to him, knowing that Josh was a suspect – the suspect? Josh, Kath and the grandchildren were everything to him. And to Rin; he’d been the dad she never had.

Robin pulled Lennie closer, breathed her in. Corinna would never cuddle Peter again – never put her arms round him and pretend to crush him while he pretended he wanted to get away. He was ten, just turned – his birthday was at the beginning of January. He’d asked for a Star Wars Lego kit and a trip to WaterWorld in Stoke. ‘Thank Christ it isn’t Alton Towers,’ Corinna had said on the phone. ‘I’d have to be tranquillized to get on one of those rides. Oblivion, Nemesis – I feel sick on the bloody spinning teacups.’ She would have done it, though, even if it had taken a general anaesthetic; she’d have done anything for Peter. Not overindulgence – he wasn’t spoiled or allowed to run wild on a diet of TV and processed sugar – but attention, fun, structure, family. Proper care. Corinna had been a great mother – way better than she was. It’s not fair, Robin wanted to shout; you fucking bastard, whoever you are, it’s not fair. Why did it have to be her?

Dennis had tried to stop her but at six thirty, she’d turned on Midlands Today. It had been the top story, trailed over the pulsing theme music. ‘Police launch a murder enquiry after an Edgbaston house fire leaves a woman dead and her son with life-threatening injuries.’ A preview of other stories to come – three teenagers jailed for a knife attack; a planning controversy; a woman looking for a bone-marrow donor – and then straight to it. Nick Owen – silver-haired, kind-eyed. He’d been the presenter since they were at school, it had to be twenty years, and now he was saying Corinna’s name.

He cut to a reporter at the scene. Russell Road, where Rin and Josh lived, was busy, the woman talking over a hum of rush-hour traffic, but the houses themselves were set back behind a verge lined with trees and a small service road now cordoned off. The reporter was a few feet outside the tape, backed by a fire investigation van and a square white forensics tent. They had a uniform at the foot of Corinna’s driveway.

Floodlights blazed over the area, and the bare February branches gave the scene a weird gothic beauty. But then the reporter had turned aside, the camera panned out and they saw the house itself. Across the room, Christine had gasped.

When she was little, Lennie had called Corinna and Josh’s the ‘snowman house’. Built in the Thirties with some Deco influence, its white stucco façade looked out from under the hat of a steep dark-tiled roof like a cheeky face, or – with the small round porthole just under the roofline – a winking emoticon. A long stained-glass window – the carrot – lit the central stairs, and the bigger, horizontal windows of the bedrooms made the eyes.

The glass was gone, shattered by the heat, and the eyes were black and gaping, lascivious soot tongues licking over the stucco above each one. The size of them – the flames must have been eight or nine feet high. The creepers either side of the front door were burned to a network of fine charcoal, intricate etchings across a face now rendered macabre, a painted Mexican skull for the Day of the Dead.

Just visible against the evening sky, beyond the reach of the floodlights, was a hole at the apex of the roof, the supporting timber burned away, tiles collapsing inward like fish-scales. Peter. The skylights were at the back of the house, Robin knew, one over the back stairs, the other – the one he must surely have jumped from – in his room, over his bed, surrounded by his glow-stars. She imagined his terror at waking to find the house on fire around him. Had his door been open? Had it come into his room? The smell; the sheer noise: roaring flame, groaning timbers, the shattering glass.

Dennis had taken her hand, squeezed it so hard her knuckles ground together, and she’d heard the reporter say, ‘… DI Webster. To confirm, this is a murder investigation?’

The camera moved to a man of about forty-five wearing a wax jacket over a suit. Broad face, short brown hair greying at the temples. Large brown eyes.

‘That is how we’re treating it, yes,’ he said. ‘Obviously, the fire damage is significant so it’ll take time to establish exactly what happened here but we do have evidence that the fire was started deliberately.’

‘And you’re appealing for help from the public?’

He looked directly at the camera. ‘Yes. We’re keen to talk to anyone who was in the Edgbaston area last night and saw or heard anything that struck them as unusual. We’re also appealing to anyone who may have seen Josh Legge or believe they know his whereabouts. Mr Legge was last seen late yesterday evening, shortly before the fire started, but not since then, and we’re particularly anxious to talk to him.’

A photograph appeared onscreen. Robin recognized it: Boxing Day two years ago, she’d been there when Kath took it. Josh was standing by the sitting-room fireplace, a glass of wine in his hand, wearing the chunky grey jumper Rin had given him for Christmas and the saggy old dad jeans she mocked him for. Kath had caught him at the end of a laugh, eyes narrowed, the corners of his mouth turned up, emphasizing a dimple in his right cheek. Robin had seen the expression a thousand times – Josh laughed easily, he was such a soft target – and yet it seemed transfigured now, the half-closed eyes not twinkling, fanned by smile lines, but narrowed to calculate, look askance, the smile not open but wry. Sly. As if in front of the Christmas fire, his family around him, he was envisaging the future, raising a toast.

‘We’re advising anyone who sees Mr Legge not to approach him but to dial 999 or contact the incident room directly on this number.’

Robin had felt a flare of frustration: were West Midlands Police up to this? They were presenting him as their suspect but what evidence did they have? They couldn’t have any: he hadn’t done it. All that talk of other lines of enquiry – as far as she could see, it was nothing but lip service. There was nothing new in the report, not a single bit of information she hadn’t heard from Thomas and Patel hours ago.

Was he SIO, this Webster? If they had a DI leading, they were treating it like a simple domestic murder, a self-solver, and it was hardly that, was it, hardly the husband turning himself in at the nick, clutching the carving knife. Was he competent? He’d done all right on camera, but that was no gauge. With his broad face and wide-spaced brown eyes, the impression he gave was bovine: Aberdeen Angus in a green wax jacket.

DS Thomas had been the opposite. In the dark of the bottom bunk now, Robin felt her face go hot. You were in the job yourself, weren’t you? She hadn’t been ready for the shame. I’m not this person, she’d wanted to say as she’d sat in that godawful armchair, D-list celeb on a wedding throne; I’m a good detective – really good. This is short-term, a cock-up; I’d never buy an aqua three-piece suite!

And Samir. Their guv’nor. What would he tell them?

Lennie shifted, turning her face towards the pillow, and Robin peeled her arm from round her stomach, feeling the sweat between their bodies. The window was open and the garden glittered with frost but the cold air reached a foot into the room then stopped, repelled by the central heating. Even the wall behind her was warm.

Corinna was dead, Josh missing. Her best friends, and there was nothing she could do. She was a DCI in the Met, not even borough CID but an operational command unit, and there was nothing she could do. Whatever her skills, however well she knew the victims, she was powerless: she had to leave it to West Midlands Police. And even then, said another voice, sly, how thorough did she really want them to be?

Chapter Five

She’d done her best but Christine was too quick. In the time it had taken Robin to get down the path and into the car, her mother had somehow lost the apron, gained a pair of shoes, a jacket and – could it be? – some lipstick and materialized at Maggie’s window.

Maggie lowered the glass. ‘Hiya, love.’ She reached her hand out and took Christine’s, perma-tan, rings and forest-green nails meeting pale, moisturized, French-manicured. Robin knew Maggie took pride in subverting expectation but still, after a lifetime, she was completely bamboozled by the friendship between the two of them. It was real friendship, decades long: Maggie was woven all through Robin’s childhood memories, not only there at Christmas drinks and summer barbecues but the person who stayed to do the washing-up and ended up sitting in the garden until the houses across the fence went dark and the only light in the sky was pollution. They went out together too, dinner and drinks, any film Dennis baulked at. Not that there were many, he was a sucker for a rom-com – his favourite film was The Wedding Singer – but Maggie was Christine’s partner for the dramas, anything emotionally gruelling. About monthly, when she’d been at school, Robin remembered, her mother would get back from their outings after eleven, relaxed – for her – and pink with Chardonnay. What the hell did they find to talk about?

‘How are you all doing this morning?’

Christine’s breath made clouds. It was eight o’clock but the lawn behind her showed no sign of thawing. ‘I don’t think anyone slept.’

‘You’ve got to take it steady, all of you. This, it’s … beyond.’

‘That’s what I wanted to say to you, Mags. I don’t think Robin should be working today – I told her what you said yesterday about taking the day off. She needs to—’

‘I’m right here,’ said Robin. ‘Aged thirty-five.’

‘Everyone handles things differently, Chris.’

‘I know but you know what she’s like. If she gets it into her head—’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

Maggie gave Robin a look then turned back to the window. ‘I’ll look after her, darl, and I’ll drop her back later on. You take care.’ She fired up the car, raising the window as they pulled off. For the full circuit of Dunnington Road, Robin said nothing. As they waited for a break in the traffic on Stratford Road, the indicator ticked like a stopwatch.

‘She’s worried about you, that’s all.’

The lights changed and they inched towards the junction, past the little branch library, nearer the deep bland lawn of South and City College on the corner. The inexorable miles of white sky overhead. Robin felt a surge of panic. ‘She’s trying to take control, like she always does. Do I have to ask her now if I’m allowed to go to work?’ A flashback to one of their old stand-up fights, her mother yelling after her as she ran up the stairs, My house, my rules.

‘If you get some sleep tonight, we can take your car tomorrow. Would that make you feel better?’

‘Make me feel less like I’m eight years old.’ Robin huffed. ‘Sorry. I don’t want to drag you into this. But I need to work, that’s what she doesn’t understand. What am I going to do otherwise, sit around there trying to cry?’ Wondering if the past had caught up with them.

Maggie took a breath, as if she were about to say something, then stopped. A moment later, ‘Anything new since yesterday?’

‘No.’

‘It was on the radio on the way over. Heart, just local. Same thing, looking for Josh, nothing we don’t already know.’ She reached for the radio. ‘Want to see if we can catch it again?’

As Robin shook her head, her phone buzzed in her pocket, a text. Gid? Eight o’clock, a few minutes after – he could just have come on shift. A small leap of hope: perhaps there’d been movement on Hinton. But no, when she took out the phone, the screen said ‘Adrian’. It was mildly startling, the name already an anachronism.

Len just told me about Corinna. Devastated for you. Here if you need me. A

For god’s sake. She couldn’t stop them being in touch – she didn’t want to, they loved each other, and it was good for Len to have a male figure in her life – but of course it meant Adrian would hear about everything that happened to them. Was he going to use this to reopen communication, even try to make her reconsider? She’d thought at least that was over and done with. She locked the phone and put it back in her pocket – she’d deal with it later.

‘Where are we going?’ she said.

‘Val Woodson’s, via coffee. I can’t be messing with that Nescafé this morning.’

‘You’ve taken her on?’

‘I’ve told her we’ll see what we can do, yeah. She’s desperate and I want to help her.’ Another pause. ‘I also thought it would be good for you.’

‘Me?’

‘It’s what you need now, isn’t it? Something to get your teeth into – something where you can actually use your skills.’ She glanced over. ‘It’s going to be very hard for you, being on the outside while this is going on. I thought this would give you another focus, something else to think about.’

‘Thank you,’ Robin said.

She watched Stratford Road slide past outside the window, One-Hour Photo and the Kerala Ayurvedic spa, a place offering cash for gold. Outside UK Furniture Clearance, a ragtag assortment of wooden cots, bedframes and awkward-looking cabinets metastasized on the pavement. She concentrated, focusing on details, looking for something she could throw a line around. If anything, the unreality was stronger this morning, the lack of sleep compounding the sense that what had been concrete was now wily, unreliable. Malign. The world had spun away – she was out on her own, free-falling.

A couple of minutes later, Maggie pulled into a spot outside a bakery three times the size of the travel agent and sari shop either side. Weddings, Parties, Functions read the awning, while photographs propped at the bottom of the plate-glass window showed enormous, multi-tiered cakes in colours and degrees of ornamentation from subtle to Bollywood. At eye level, a poster offered Morning Breakfast Deals at astonishing prices. Fried egg, two toasts and beans, £2.75 – you’d be lucky to get a single slice of toast for that in London.

‘Come with me,’ said Maggie, undoing her seatbelt. ‘Meet Gamil.’

Inside, the air was heady, the smell of coffee and eggs on the griddle cut with condensed milk, coconut and cinnamon. On the right, a long glass cabinet displayed ranks of Indian sweets in pinks and greens and caramel tones. Kaju barfi, mysore pak – an image suddenly of Aisha’s wedding, the boxes and boxes of sweets they’d pressed on her because they all knew – it was a family joke – how much she loved them. Robin shook her head, flicked the memory away.

‘Maggie.’ A man in his mid-fifties stepped out from behind the counter, pulling off a pair of blue gloves. He dropped them in a bin and came to greet her, taking her hands in his. ‘We haven’t seen you for ages.’ Indian sing-song met Brummie sing-song, his voice all music. Heavy-lidded eyes with extravagant bags looked out from a face that was otherwise remarkably line-free. His hairline had receded parallel with his ears, and the deep exposed forehead and long nose with its arched nostrils gave him an avian look. At the same time, he had something French going on, the thick white cotton shirt with cuffs rolled to the elbow, perhaps, or the tan loafers. An Indian Serge Gainsbourg, minus the sleaze.

‘I haven’t had much over here lately,’ Maggie said, ‘but we might do for a bit and I wanted to introduce you to my friend Robin. Friend and colleague – we’re going to be working together.’

‘Robin? My pleasure.’ A firm, dry handshake. ‘Coffee for two? I’ve got a fresh pot this side, just done.’

‘How are things with you?’ Maggie looked at the line of people queuing to order breakfast sandwiches. ‘You’re mobbed.’

‘Yes, morning rush, always busy, busy.’ He went back behind the sweets cabinet and pulled paper cups from a long stack. ‘Just as well – three kids at university. Have I seen you since? Wasim got a place at Nottingham. Computer Science.’

‘Younger son,’ Maggie said. ‘He helps out in the shop sometimes, you might meet him if we’re over here. That’s smashing, Gamil, congratulations.’

‘Last one. Just the A-levels now and then, pouf, all my little birds flown. Now, what are you having? Doughnut, flapjack? New muffins are just out of the oven.’

‘You’re all right, thanks, love. Still playing chicken with the diabetes express here, so I resist on the very few occasions I can do it without chewing my arm off. Rob?’

‘No. Thank you.’

He brought the coffees over and put them on top of the display counter. ‘Very hot – careful. Omelette’s good if you don’t want sugar. I can make it for you myself.’

‘Thanks, this’ll do me.’ Maggie inhaled a vaporous sip from the top. ‘Now, ulterior motive, I wanted to ask you if you know someone.’ She reached inside her long suede coat and brought out a folded sheet of A4 printed with a grainy photo. ‘He’s basically the mayor of Sparkhill,’ she said to Robin. ‘Knows everyone round here.’

Gamil rolled his eyes. ‘Show me.’

Maggie handed it over and he unhooked a pair of glasses from the V of his shirt and put them on. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I don’t know her but she gets the bus just outside, comes in two or three days a week to get something to take with her. Friendly girl, says hello, good morning. She lives somewhere up that way.’ He gestured towards the shop door, left, in the direction of Valerie Woodson’s house.

‘You don’t know her name?’

‘Wasim might. Though she looks a bit older, more Faiza’s age?’

‘Yes, she left school three or four years back. Can you remember when you last saw her?’

‘Not today. Not yesterday but I was in the kitchen a lot so … Last week, yes, that big rainstorm – Tuesday, Wednesday – the bus shelter was full so I said to the people come and stand under cover. She was there.’

‘Have you ever heard anything about her?’

Gamil smiled at Robin. ‘She thinks I’m a gossip.’

‘You are a gossip,’ said Maggie.

He shook his head. ‘So mean to me. No, no rumours.’ He passed them plastic lids from a box on the counter behind him. ‘I see her walk past sometimes at the weekend, too, maybe shopping, but otherwise …’

‘How do you know she lives up that way?’ Robin asked.

‘Ah.’ A small frown, eyebrows drawing together. ‘You’ve reminded me. There was one time, I remember it – just before Divali, the end of October – I was coming in early to deal with the festival orders, walking, and I saw her.’

‘Early?’

‘Four, four thirty – still dark. Bakery hours, you know.’

‘What was she doing?’

‘Getting out of a taxi. Coming home from a party, I think – she was a bit … wobbly. Big shoes, heels – she took them off, walked barefoot up the street in that direction.’ He mock-shivered. ‘Too cold. She was in one of those unlicensed taxis. Like a normal car. Maybe Uber, no way to be sure.’

‘How did you know it was a cab?’ asked Robin.

‘She got out of the back, but when it went by, the front passenger seat was empty.’ He shook his head. ‘Too dangerous – how do you know who you’re getting? When she left home, I made Faiza promise, promise me she would never do that. Black cabs only, I said, send me the receipts, I’ll pay. I meant to say something to her the next time I saw her,’ he tapped the paper with his fingertip, ‘this girl. But I forgot. May I ask what’s happening with her?’

Maggie nodded. ‘She’s gone missing.’

Becca’s room was at the rear of the house, its narrow sash window overlooking the side return, a tiny yard and the red-brick backs of the houses behind. The bed was a single, tucked tight into the corner, but it ate up almost a third of the floor space anyway, leaving an L-shaped peninsula of carpet barely wide enough to walk around. The redundant chimney breast took a big chunk, too, and created two deep alcoves, one that housed a wardrobe, the other a chest of drawers topped with a pine-framed mirror.

Despite its size, the room was quite appealing. Robin had expected clutter, slippery stacks of magazines, heaps of clothes, a sticky basket of make-up slowly gathering dust, but instead it was minimalist. The two magazines on the shelf of the tiny bedside table – she stooped: Elle and Heat – were both lined up squarely under a library copy of Veg Every Day and a well-worn paperback Jane Eyre. The bedcover was white seersucker, the anglepoise-style lamp brushed steel. A shot glass held a tiny cactus.

‘You haven’t cleaned up in here?’ Maggie asked.

‘No.’ Valerie hovered at the threshold, anxiety rising off her like a heat haze. Another person who didn’t sleep last night, Robin had thought when she opened the front door. She knew about Corinna, Maggie had told her yesterday on the phone, and as she’d come in, Valerie had touched her arm. ‘I’m so sorry about your friend.’

‘The police asked me that, too, when they looked,’ she said now. ‘She always keeps it like this – she says it feels bigger when it’s tidy.’

‘Is anything missing, that you know of?’ said Maggie.

‘No, I’ve checked. Her jewellery’s all there.’ She pointed to a lacquered box on the chest. ‘Not that she’s got much that’s worth anything, just the two rings Graeme’s mother left her and a charm bracelet. I looked for her overnight bag, just in case, but it’s still in the bottom of the wardrobe. She only had her handbag.’

A shallow bamboo tray next to the box held a liquid eyeliner, mascara, and an eyeshadow palette in matte greys. Without touching it, Robin read the bottom of a Maybelline lipstick: Very Cherry. ‘Is this the make-up she uses?’

Valerie nodded. ‘She’s got another lipstick in her bag but, normally, if she’s going on somewhere after work, she takes all this with her.’ Her voice became a croak.

Maggie went back to the doorway and put her hands on her shoulders. ‘Valerie, love, I know it’s bloody impossible but try to give yourself a break, will you? You’re going to wear yourself out. Why don’t you have a cup of tea and we’ll come down when we’re finished? We’ll be very careful.’

Valerie hesitated then nodded, her eyes shining with tears.

They waited until they heard shoes on the kitchen tiles and a rush of water in the pipes. ‘Here,’ Maggie passed Robin a pair of exam gloves from her bag and put on a pair herself. She squeezed round behind her, opened the wardrobe and looked inside. ‘I’ll do this, you take the chest.’

Robin tugged the shallow top drawer open, feeling the twinge in her shoulder. After Lennie had gone to sleep, she hadn’t risked moving, and she’d come round from the semi-conscious state she’d eventually fallen into to find one arm completely dead. Crouching toad-like, trying not to wake her, she’d extricated herself via the end of the bed, smacking her head on the top bunk as she’d stepped down.

Becca’s underwear was a mix of comfortable black cotton and skimpier, lacier things in fuchsia pink, blue and jade green designed to be seen or at least worn for a bit of a private confidence boost. Like the rest of the room, the drawer was tidy – not Christine-standard by any stretch, but neater than her own by a factor of about five; the socks in pairs, for example, rather than a static knot tossed in straight from the dryer.

T-shirts, then sweaters, all redolent of fabric softener. Robin worked her way steadily through them, shaking things out then refolding and laying them carefully on the bed. She ran her fingertips into the corners of each drawer and took out the striped lining paper. No photos taped underneath or love letters cajoling her to run away, leave it all behind; no little bag of resin or pills or even a cheeky packet of Marlboro Golds.

The clothes were cheap – H&M, Primark, Zara; tops in rayon and flimsy cotton, the knitwear more manmade fibre than wool – but they’d been taken care of, ironed and neatly folded. They’d been chosen carefully, too. The going-out things had net panels and lacy bits – racy enough – but almost everything had some design, a detail that gave it a bit of flair: a ballet wrap, a boat neck, ties at the wrists.

For all the times she’d done it, Robin hated going through people’s intimate stuff. Even in a situation like this, where the aim wasn’t to incriminate but to learn, maybe find a lead, it made her feel grubby. The thought of some sweaty-fingered DC raking through Corinna’s underwear made her want to puke all over again. But maybe it wouldn’t happen – couldn’t. Given the extent of the fire damage, Corinna’s clothes had likely been reduced to a heap of ash and melted hangers. Even if they hadn’t been destroyed, none of them would be worth keeping; those that weren’t burned would be drenched, and if they’d escaped even that, they’d reek so strongly of smoke that no one who’d loved Rin could ever bear to go near them. At least Di would be spared the task of sorting through her daughter’s things. But by the same token, there would be nothing for Peter to bury his face in, nothing left that smelled of his mother. Robin pressed the idea, running her finger along it as if it were a blade. She wanted it to hurt, to cut through to the ball of potential pain she still hadn’t been able to access. Why couldn’t she cry? What was wrong with her?

With a screech on the rail, Maggie pushed things to one side and took out a black body-con dress. She held it up to the light.

‘She bought that in the sales last month.’ Valerie appeared in the mirror behind her. Robin jumped, and turned around.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to … She and Lucy – her best friend – they got up at four o’clock to go. The trousers she was wearing when she … She got them sixty per cent off – she was so chuffed. She bought me a cardigan, too. That’s Lucy.’ In a second, Valerie was at Robin’s side, pointing to a photograph tucked into the mirror-frame of a pretty girl with light brown hair twisted into a top-knot. She wore a strappy, gym-type T-shirt and her face was flushed and shiny with sweat. ‘They did a 10K run last April, the three of them.’

‘He being the third?’ Robin pointed at the man with his arm around the girl’s shoulders, same age, mixed race. Eyes closed against the sun but grinning, a near-empty water bottle hanging between the fingers of his other hand.

‘Harry, yes.’

‘They look close – are they together?’

‘Lucy and Harry? No. Lucy’s going out with Cal – Calvin. They’re just friends, the three of them. I always worried about that – three’s a crowd – but it works. They’ve been friends for years, since they all started at Grafton House.’

‘Grafton House?’ said Maggie. ‘The private school?’

‘Graeme had a life-insurance policy. That’s what I spent it on. We talked about it before he died. She went to state school until she was eleven, then Grafton.’

‘Do you have Lucy and Harry’s numbers?’

‘I’ve got hers – she’ll be able to give you his.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Becca and Harry were never involved?’ said Robin.

She shook her head. ‘As I say, it’s always just been platonic.’

Missed opportunity, Robin thought; he was fit. She heard Corinna’s voice suddenly, dust-dry, ‘For god’s sake, Rob. I’m dead, you’re trying to find someone who’s probably dead as well – a little focus, perhaps?’

The pain – longing, loss, a desperate urge to laugh; it was sheer luck that she didn’t yelp. She caught her own eye in the mirror – steady, steady – then Valerie’s. She looked away, took a deep breath. A little focus. ‘Yesterday,’ she said, ‘when you told us you checked in with her work because her bed hadn’t been slept in – was that unusual? If she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Does she stay over with friends? How often doesn’t she sleep here?’

There was a pause, small but marked. ‘It was when I found the phone as well that I started worrying, not just the bed. Rebecca’s twenty-two. She can stay out, can’t she?’

‘Of course.’ Maggie, soothing.

‘But just to be clear, you mean with men?’ Robin pressed.

‘She’s an attractive girl, she’s never gone short of attention. She has flings, yes. One-night stands.’ Valerie locked eyes with her, as if daring her to be shocked.

You’ll have to try harder than that, Robin thought. ‘Has she been doing it lately? Staying out, I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would she go home with someone she’d never met before? A stranger?’

Valerie turned to the window, biting a piece of dry skin on her lip between her eye teeth. ‘I don’t know. No, of course I do. She would. Yes.’

Chapter Six

When Robin was in her final year of junior school, a local woman was kidnapped. Stephanie Slater was twenty-five, an estate agent, taken from a house she’d been showing in Great Barr, only a few miles away in the north of the city. It became a major national news story, one of the biggest manhunts in British history. Christine and Dennis whispered about it in the other room, waited ’til she’d gone to bed to watch the news, but the details had been in the air, all anyone could talk about: the ransom money snatched from a railway bridge, the coffin-sized box inside a green wheelie bin in which Slater had been locked in darkness for eight days, told that if she moved she’d be electrocuted. After she was released, she described how she’d talked to Michael Sams, and kept talking, so he’d be forced to understand that she was a person, a human being. Her bravery and presence of mind probably kept her alive.

Michael Sams, badger-faced, wooden-legged Michael Sams – by the following year, when Robin started at the grammar school and met Corinna, he’d become a playground bogeyman, the shadowy figure who offered you the bag of sweets, who shoved you into the back of a van as you walked home from the corner shop at twilight. Michael Sams’ll get you.

And then, two years later, barely fifty miles away in Gloucester, came Fred and Rose West.

She and Rin were twelve turning thirteen by then: prime-time adolescence. It had gone on for weeks, the systematic taking-apart of the house at Cromwell Street where, over decades, Fred and Rose had together raped, tortured and killed young women, including their own daughters. White forensic suits on the news, day after day, week after week, another set of remains and another and another, in the garden, in holes dug in the cellar floor. Again her parents had tried to shield her but away from Dunnington Road, she and Rin had followed the news with a horrified fascination, reading the papers, watching the news at Rin’s place when Di was at work and Will, babysitting, was doing his homework in the other room. There were few stories, thank god, as depraved as that. Rose was found guilty on ten counts of murder; Fred, charged with twelve, never stood trial. He committed suicide while on remand at Winson Green, HMP Birmingham, just a handful of miles up the road. Robin remembered: it was New Year’s Day.

Two of the biggest crime stories of the decade, both local, both sexual violence against young women, a double whammy that happened just as she and Corinna became aware of the news, aware that they were – or soon would be – young women, and that monsters were not just in books but opening their car doors to offer you a lift in the rain.

It started with Stephanie Slater, her bravery as she lay alone in the dark, injured and terrified. To Robin, she became a hero, a symbol of strength, and when the Wests and their house of horrors came to light, Robin had an epiphany: that was what she wanted. She wanted strength. She wanted to be a hero. She wanted to break down the door and rescue the next Stephanie Slater. She wanted to be the one who followed the Wests home, kicked Fred in the bollocks, and pulled the girl away from the car, the teetering edge of the void.

That was what she told anyone who asked why she’d decided to go into the police. Over the years, she’d made it sound more and more ridiculous – Behold the high-kicking, karate-chopping teen ninja girl! Marvel at the self-importance, the naivety! – but it was true; it had been the first reason before she had another.

Maggie hadn’t followed the Slater case in the news: she’d worked on it. Not immediately, on the original core team, but as soon as the investigation started to expand. Unsurprisingly, it loomed large in her memory. She’d kept quiet at Valerie’s, of course, but in the car on their way here to the office, she’d brought it up.

‘Kidnap for ransom? Really?’ Robin was dubious. Nothing about the Woodsons’ set-up said money, and Valerie’s only real savings, she’d told them, were in a small private pension that wouldn’t mature for another seventeen years.

‘Remember the Slater case?’ Maggie said. ‘It was her employers, the estate agents, that Sams went after – he wanted their insurance money. Valerie might not have much but Becca works for a silversmith.’

Hanley’s. Battered floral address book in hand, Valerie had given them the number. ‘They make photo frames and candlesticks,’ she said. ‘Hip flasks and the like. Corporate gifts.’

‘They’d have had a demand by now, wouldn’t they?’ said Robin. ‘Thursday to Tuesday – five days?’

‘Yes. Unless …’ Maggie had glanced across. ‘Julie Dart.’

Mentally shafted as she was, it had taken Robin three or four seconds to connect the dots. Then she did.

The investigation into Sams had expanded beyond Stephanie Slater. Based on similarities in the two cases, West Yorkshire Police believed that a year earlier, in Leeds, he had abducted another woman – if woman was the word. Julie Dart had been just eighteen when he’d taken her, a kidnapping ‘dry run’ that went wrong; she’d managed to escape from the coffin-sized box and he’d returned to find her desperately trying to get out of his workshop. He’d killed her.

‘If there’d been a demand, we wouldn’t be on the case, obviously – the police would be all over it,’ Maggie said. ‘But if something went wrong, he – or they – might not have got that far. He might have killed her, jettisoned the plan, like Sams did.’

‘But if it is abduction, don’t you think a sexual motive’s more likely?’

‘I do. But all lines of enquiry at this stage – everything’s on the table until we get something solid. What else? There’s a new notebook in the glovebox there; let’s get some of this down.’

The list was on the table in front of Robin now, a spiral-bound page of parental pain from basic heartbreak to worst nightmare: she’d met someone and run away, upped and left; had an accident; overdosed; killed herself; been killed. The only good-news scenario, really, was that she’d needed to get away and had taken a break somewhere to clear her head. But then why not tell her mother, especially when they were so close? Why put her through this? And wouldn’t she have taken something with her – a few clothes, her washbag? The only things she could see were missing, Valerie said, were the clothes she’d walked out in that morning.

And then there was her phone.

‘Anything in her online stuff?’

Robin clicked back onto Facebook as Maggie stood and came around the table. The picture she’d been looking at was a social-media classic. Taken the Christmas before last, fourteen months ago, it showed Becca and Lucy with their heads together, big living-our-best-lives grins. Slight over-exposure made their lineless skin near-perfect. They were both wearing beanies – Becca’s navy and studded with little silver beads, Lucy’s dark burgundy with a scarf the same colour – and both had long wings of hair protruding from their hats like Afghan ears, Lucy’s light brown, Becca’s darker. In their hands were red cardboard cups, presumably the hot chocolate for sale at the stand behind them, beyond which, just visible, were the Palladian columns of the Council House in Victoria Square. Christmas Market with my bestie! Becca had written. Love winter!

Besties, BFFs – the terms hadn’t existed when she and Corinna were that age. Not that they would have used them anyway – they didn’t make a thing of their friendship like that. Even if she hadn’t been up to her ears in nappies and revision when she was twenty-two, Robin doubted she would have been slinging her arms around her anyway, huddling in for photo after photo. Corinna might have made her do it occasionally – she was more of a cuddler.

She moved sideways to give Maggie a better view. ‘Nothing that rings alarm bells,’ she said. ‘It’s what you’d expect – pictures of her and her mates at parties and pubs, a couple of weddings, the occasional cat video or viral thing of someone doing something stupid. Nothing provocative, no bikini pictures or underwear-posing. I’ve been through all the comments for the past two years and there’s no one creepy or over-keen, nothing that struck me as dodgy. Almost everyone appears in pictures from several different occasions, and I cross-referenced the less regular ones, who all seem bona fide, friends of friends, etc. I found Nick.’

‘Show me?’

Robin scrolled back to September and a picture of a man in jeans and a maroon Adidas top. He was about thirty with curly hair cut short at the sides, left longer on top. Possibly – local pride – he’d been going for the Peaky Blinders look but it came off more Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables. The darkness of it made his skin look slightly vitamin-deficient by contrast but he was attractive, tall and fit, muscle visible round the shoulders under the burgundy nylon.

‘Hm. Is there just Facebook?’

‘No, Instagram too.’ Robin toggled to @BeccaWoods95’s curated vision of the world. Birmingham, UK. Food, books, fashion, design. 152 posts, 95 followers, 241 following.

‘The last thing was this, four days before she disappeared.’ She moved the cursor over a picture of a bowl of spiced chickpea soup reposted from a cooking blog. ‘About half of the posts are food-related, mostly photos of things she made, with little comments.’ She clicked on a square captioned ‘Sacher torte – worth every one of the 174,329 calories!’

The rest was books and arty shots of silhouettes and trees, a few bits of interior design – nice chairs and rugs and kitchens – and then fashion, all pretty standard stuff. A woman in a green backless evening gown on a moonlit terrace was hashtagged Goals but the handful of reposts from fashion blogs were down to earth otherwise: women in superior combinations of boots, skinny jeans and enormous cardigans. It was a sort of rose-tinted, better-dressed version of real life. ‘And only three solo selfies – nothing by prevailing standards.’ A couple of weeks ago, in Shepherd’s Bush, Robin had seen a woman pouting into her phone by the green veg at Tesco.

‘Hm. What time did she say, again – Lucy?’

‘Four.’

‘I’ve just had an email from Roger Hanley; he can do four thirty at his office.’

The Jewellery Quarter. ‘You take him, then; I’ll take her?’

Maggie looked at her. ‘I thought – just for now – we could work together.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m fully trained.’

‘That wasn’t why I—’

‘It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m not going to fall apart.’ Brooking no argument.

Maggie hesitated, then sighed – All right, against my better judgement. She reached for her coat. ‘I’m going to run down and get a sandwich. What can I get you?’

‘Nothing. I’m okay for now.’

‘Robin.’

‘Something simple then – cheese and tomato. Thanks.’

Maggie shrugged the coat on. ‘Will you be all right here?’

‘For ten minutes, while you buy a couple of sandwiches?’

The door closed and Maggie’s boots clomped down the steep wooden staircase towards the street door. The office took up two rooms on the third floor of a red-brick building at the nether end of Cannon Street, above a hairdresser, opposite a bridal shop and the entrance to the parking garage where they’d left the car. Coming in, Robin had seen the city centre shops she remembered of old, Poundland and Coral bookies, multiple outlets selling cheap sportswear, but just down the street, apparently, there was now a large branch of Jigsaw.

‘Oh yes,’ Maggie had said, ‘we’re getting proper posh. We’ve got a Jack Wills and a Muji within a two-minute walk now, get us. I’m very partial to the Japanese stationery, I’ve got to admit; I’ve bought all sorts of bits and bobs – little staplers and notebooks and what have you. Can’t resist it.’

Downstairs, the door slammed shut. Robin stood up. Her eyes were dry from lack of sleep and the hour and a half she’d just spent staring at Becca Woodson’s life online. She stretched her neck and did a circuit of the dining table that dominated the main room. This was where Maggie took meetings, she said, and also where she did her desk work. The office had two laptops, one exclusively Maggie’s and an ageing Dell, which Robin would share with Lorraine, the woman who came in two days a week to do the billing and other paperwork. She was currently halfway through a fortnight in Lanzarote, Maggie said; she took a break in February every year, to help with her SAD.

A desk and a bank of filing cabinets were housed in a second, smaller room that led off this one and got its only natural light from the glass panels along the top of the dividing wall. A handful of large leather-leaved plants dotted here and there and that was it, her new place of work.

She took the kettle from its tray on top of the filing cabinets and carried it out to the miniature kitchen shared with the temp agency in the rooms across the landing. With some difficulty, she got it into position under the tap in the tiny sink and filled it.

Back in the office, she brought up the West Midlands Police’s Twitter feed. She’d been checking it every ten or fifteen minutes, skimming over cycle safety and community policing notices to the frequent ones about serious crimes – another stabbing in Handsworth, a fatal hit-and-run in Balsall Heath, a slavery charge brought against two brothers in Lozells. There’d been a run of tweets with photos hashtagged MISSING. ‘Have you seen Bill Scott? He’s missing from West Bromwich and we’re really concerned for him. Please call 101 with any information.’ She’d scrolled through them looking – hoping – for Josh; instead, with a jolt, she’d seen Corinna’s face. Murder enquiry launched following Edgbaston fire. Corinna Legge (pictured) sadly passed away yesterday. Heart in her throat, Robin clicked on the link and read the short post on the police site but there was nothing new, still just the barest details of the fire, the search for Josh Legge (pictured), believed to have been at the scene when the blaze broke out.

All the local news sources had the story – the Birmingham Post, the Mail and Midlands Today – but again, none of them had a single new detail. Either the police were keeping information back or they didn’t have anything.

Corinna Legge sadly passed away yesterday. She read the words again. They were ungraspable, completely surreal. Aliens land in the Bull Ring; Elvis spotted at Villa Park; Corinna Legge sadly passed away yesterday.

Yesterday – it was only technically still true. It was one o’clock, already almost thirty-six hours now since the neighbours had sounded the alarm, a day and a half. Rin was falling further and further behind, slipping away.

Robin reached for the notebook and turned to a new page. ‘Assuming arson’, she wrote, and underlined it. Quickly, she put down everything that came into her head, the earliest ideas – botched burglary; extortion attempt; feud with a third party; the road rage she’d mentioned off the cuff to the police – and the ones that, as the hours had started to stretch, she’d begun to have to entertain: someone Josh had crossed in business; something at Corinna’s work; someone obsessed with one of them – a man or woman scorned, a bunny boiler; the partner of that person.

Revenge.

She read the list back. Burglary was still the only thing on it that seemed plausible. Rin and Josh woken in the small hours by a noise downstairs, investigating and confronting whoever it was they found, refusing to stand down. They would have tried to fight back, defend their home – yes, they would.

The rest made no sense. Josh’s factory manufactured metal springs, and it had been going steadily for decades, probably a century at this point. People he did business with became family friends. Once, years ago, she’d been at theirs just before Christmas and he’d brought home six bottles of Scotch, all of them gifts from customers or suppliers. He’d shared another six between his sales manager and tool-maker. He was an old-fashioned manufacturer, making things that people needed and selling them, not some dodgy property developer, kicking tenants out of their homes, stiffing people on contracts.

And for another woman to feel scorned enough, Josh would have to be involved with her, surely. He was kind, a gentleman – what if someone had mistaken his kindness for attraction? If he’d been pursued, caught at a moment of weakness …

No. Robin would stake her worldly goods – the boxes behind the bedroom door and the ones now moved to the garage – on him being faithful.

You moved yesterday?

She remembered the look Thomas had given Patel. They were right, of course – she would have been all over that, too. There were such things as coincidences, but they were suspicious until proven otherwise, every time.

Her stomach turned over. No. She stopped herself. Just think: how else could that be connected?

Could Hinton be involved somehow? Was that possible? He was at large, whereabouts unknown – he could be in Birmingham. And he certainly had contacts here. But she was the person who’d let him go – she’d been fired for it, plastered all over the sodding Mail and the Evening Standard. Even if it hadn’t been crystal to him that day, he’d know now. So – who? The person who had actually killed Farrell? An enemy of his?

No – it was too intricate, too massive a leap. Even if it was Hinton himself, which was unlikely enough, or Farrell’s killer, why would they harm Corinna? And how would they even know she and Rin were friends? No one would find them posing together on social media. Plus, there’d been no threat, no claim afterwards – what would be the point of doing it if she, the target in this scenario, wasn’t even aware? No, this was crazy stuff.

She bent her head, dug her nails into her scalp. What the fuck was going on? How could she find out?

Picking up her phone, she opened Contacts. Last night, she’d rung Di, Corinna’s mother. She’d been ashamed of how relieved she’d felt to get voicemail. She’d left a message saying just that she was heartbroken, and heartbroken for her. ‘If I can do anything, Di, anything at all, please let me know.’ Just words, however much she meant them.

Will’s number was underneath his mother’s. Robin had it from group texts – photos of Peter, details for birthday parties and dinners – but she hadn’t actually called him since the old days, when she and Rin were sixth formers and he’d used to pick them up from parties, sober as a judge in his little Peugeot. Will didn’t drink, never had. ‘Just not my thing,’ he said but Rin told her it was deeper than that. He was afraid that if he started drinking, he’d never stop.

‘Does he think that for a reason? Does he feel like he’s an alcoholic?’

‘No, but it runs in families; alcoholics quite often have alcoholic kids. He says he can’t risk it.’

Will had been an adult since he was twelve, responsible and reliable as bedrock. While they’d been out getting smashed, he’d been studying. He’d done medicine at Edinburgh and he was a consultant neurologist now, at the Alexandra in Redditch. His wife, Lily, was an anaesthetist and they lived with their son and daughter in a snazzy barn conversion near Henley. Not bad for a bloke whose nickname at the boys’ grammar, where irony was king, had been Thrill. But was he ever actually that boring? He was no Sean Harvey, tearing the place up with his delinquent tendencies and come-to-bike-shed eyes, but when you could hear what he was saying, Will was funny, which had become more apparent as, with the advent of Lily, he’d become more confident and thus more audible.

He answered almost immediately. ‘Robin?’

They spoke at the same time. ‘How are you?’

‘I don’t even know,’ he said. ‘Stunned.’

‘How’s your mum?’

‘She’s … not good. She’s with Peter at the hospital, she was there all night.’

‘The police came to talk to me yesterday – you probably know. They said he broke a lot of bones.’

‘Yes, but the real issue’s the lung. They keep calling it a puncture but it was more of a tear – the end of the broken rib tore the lung. They’ve operated, obviously, but now it’s a waiting game. If he gets an infection, it could all just …’ He trailed off into silence.

‘What happened, Will? What are the police saying?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. The same as yesterday.’

‘You don’t think Josh did this, do you?’

‘No. I don’t.’ He paused. ‘But I don’t know what else to think, either. If he didn’t, where the hell is he?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.