I take a moment to adjust to what Oscar has said; blinking, I allow my eyes to settle on the image of the girl. In this picture her hair is a faded red, clearly dyed, chopped shorter than I remember, just above her shoulders, but they are the same large brown eyes and teeth that overlap slightly at the front. In this photo, she is wearing a hospital robe; in her arms lies a newborn baby.

Looking at the woman’s face, I feel the colour drain from my cheeks.

With a start, I feel Oscar’s hand on my arm. ‘Are you all right?’

The finality of the image hits me like a giant wave. Suddenly, all the adrenaline, the need to convince Oscar – and myself – of what I’d seen that night on the Heath drains away, and what is left is a feeling of total deflation.

There is something about the tenderness of the image, this intensely personal moment, that makes me feel like an intruder. Looking away, I clear my throat.

‘So it is the woman you saw?’ Oscar asks.

‘It’s her.’ I stare for one more moment and then I blink hard. This should have been my moment of glory, the moment I was proved right, and yet rather than feeling victorious I just feel horribly sad.

Oscar nods. ‘There’s something else. We got the results through from the fingerprints at your flat. The person who attacked you, he was already on the system for dealing. Looks like you wrote about the gang he was working for last year. Just some kid, took advantage of the broken front-door pane. Who knows who was paying him. You might want to keep your head down for a while.’

I stand, breathing deeply. My voice sounds far away when I speak. ‘Right.’

‘We’ve got an address for her sister,’ Oscar adds as I move to the door. ‘We’ll get someone from family liaison down there to speak to her. So you don’t need to worry about this anymore. Go home and rest, yeah? I’ll call you when we know more.’

Chapter 59

Gabriela

She hadn’t said goodbye. So instinctive was her reaction to the eyes staring back at her from the street that she immediately pressed the cancel button, her children’s faces instantly vanishing. Running to the bathroom, she pushed the door closed and fumbled, her fingers like sticks of jelly, as she attempted to remove one SIM card and replace it with the other from her pocket.

The moment she managed to wedge the new SIM in position, she heard banging at the front door. Opening the bathroom and moving back into the hall, she could hear Ivan’s voice saying her name. By the time she reached the front door and unhooked the latch, Layla’s cry was calling out from the bedroom.