“Ray’s meeting us after he’s organised the door-to-doors,” Steph said as she waited at the car park barrier. “Kash is coming along as well, so you two can start the search while we interview Mum and siblings.” She fished in her leather-bound, official-issue Major Crimes binder and pulled out a sheet of paper with a school photo clipped to its top corner. “Here you go: Kyle Parker, fourteen years old. A mate of his PM’d the Manchester Met Facebook page this morning when we ran a report and a description of Parker on our wall. He had a distinctive scar from an old fracture, so we hit the jackpot early. According to the message, the friend hasn’t seen him for two, maybe three weeks.”

Rosie looked at the image, finding it difficult to reconcile the smirking lad—cowlicked hair, cockeyed school tie, freckles across the bridge of his nose—with his traumatised body.

“He seemed smaller last night,” she said. “It’s weird, isn’t it, how big a part personality plays.”

“Without that, we’re just meat and bones.” Steph flicked her visor down, blocking out a rare glare of sunshine that was bouncing off the wet road. She sounded far more sanguine than Rosie, but then she hadn’t spent an hour pounding on the child’s sternum.

“Has he been missing from home or skipping school?” Rosie asked.

“Both, apparently.” Steph turned the page in Rosie’s hand. “There’s a transcript of the first contact with Mum halfway down. The rumour mill on Curzon beat the official death message visit, and she phoned within ten minutes of us receiving the Facebook PM. Needless to say, I can’t wait to meet her.”

Rosie read through the transcript, reached the end, and reread it to let it sink in. Deborah Parker—“Call me Debbie”—had opened the conversation by declaring she’d always known her eldest son would “go and do something fucking stupid.” Having declined to attend the mortuary to identify his body—“I’ll send my dad. I’ve got to collect my bennies at eight”—she had ended the call with an enquiry about “doing one of them press conferences like what you see on the telly.”

“She sounds delightful, doesn’t she?” Steph said. She turned off the main road and braked for the first in a series of speed bumps designed to stop joy riders from haring round the estate.