The case was an unsolved missing person: a minor who went missing from her back garden in 2005. Kelly examined the photograph supplied by the parents at the time and wondered why she hadn’t heard the case on the news, but she was in London in 2005, a rookie with her nose to the grindstone. A missing thirteen-year-old in Cumbria wouldn’t have made her radar. The address of the girl at the time was noted as Embleton, west of Bassenthwaite Lake. It was in the middle of nowhere and as Kelly read on, she found that the investigating officers at the time surmised, after exhausting all leads, that the girl had been seen at the campsite at the northern edge of the lake, acting strangely. Further enquires revealed that the girl had argued with her parents and stormed off in search of some way of funding her growing weed habit. The parents admitted that all was not well with the troublesome teenager, and they’d washed their hands of her. She’d begun drinking alcohol at the age of eleven, fallen in with an unsavoury crowd and often hung about the many campsites dotted around, looking for older men to hook up with.

It was a sorry tale, and Kelly felt a pang of helplessness. She could feel the animosity towards the girl from her parents jump off the pages, and she wondered what the hell they were doing, while their daughter was wandering around looking for drugs and men. It was all too clear that the girl was being sexually exploited by those older men and put herself in regular danger.

No shit, thought Kelly. The girl clearly had no self-worth, and Kelly wondered what the parents had to say about that. A thirteen-year-old girl should be at home, safe and warm, reading a goddamn book about romance and vampires, not smoking weed and allowing her body to be abused. Why?

In her experience of working child cases, Kelly had come to the conclusion that kids were pushed away from childhood, they didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and say to themselves ‘today I’m going to fuck and get high’: a period of nosediving self-esteem came first, usually at the hands of parents or bullies, or both. She examined the history further and found that the teenager had liaised with various lowlifes linked to campsites, but all leads were thoroughly investigated and became dead ends, until there were none left and the parents accepted that she’d probably waded into Bassenthwaite Lake, disoriented and drunk, and drowned.

The lake had never been dredged.

Kelly wondered idly how many bodies might lay undiscovered in the National Park’s deep lakes, and if that girl’s was among them. She picked up a photograph of her and examined her face. She’d seen it before: dead eyes, lost promises, crushing expectations, and innocence raped. She closed the file and moved on.