When we got out it was lunchtime, not that either of us felt like eating. The mist had burned off, but it was still dark as dusk; the sky was heavy with cold clouds, and on the horizon the hills were a smoky, sullen green. Hospital traffic had picked up: people going in and out, an ambulance unloading a young guy in motorcycle leathers with one leg at a bad angle, a clutch of girls in scrubs helpless with laughter over something on one of their phones. I said, “You made it. Well done, Detective.”

Richie made a hoarse sound halfway between a cough and a retch, and I whipped my coat out of his way, but he wiped a hand over his mouth and pulled it together. “Just about. Yeah.”

I said, “You’re thinking that, next time you get a chance at some sleep, you’ll need a couple of shots of straight whiskey first. Don’t do it. The last thing you want is to have dreams and not be able to wake up.”

“Jesus,” Richie said softly, not to me.

“Keep your eye on the prize. The day our boy goes down for life, it’ll be the icing on the cake, knowing you ticked every box along the way.”

“That’s if we get him. If we don’t …”

“No ifs, my friend. That’s not how I roll. He’s ours.”

Richie was still looking at nothing. I made myself comfortable on the wall again and pulled out my mobile, to give him a chance to take a few deep breaths. “Let’s get ourselves updated,” I said, when the phone was ringing. “See what’s been going down in the real world,” and he woke up and came over to sit beside me.

I checked in with headquarters first: O’Kelly was going to want a full update and a chance to tell me to stop fucking about and catch someone, both of which I was happy to give him, and I wanted updates of my own. The searchers had turned up a small stash of hash, a woman’s razor and a cake tin. The sub-aqua team had found a badly rusted bicycle and a pile of building rubble; they were still going, but the currents were strong enough that they didn’t hold out much hope of anything smaller having stayed put for more than an hour or two. Bernadette had assigned us an incident room—one of the good ones, with plenty of desks and a decent-sized whiteboard and a working DVD-cum-VCR player, so someone could watch CCTV footage and the Spains’ home movies—and a couple of the floaters were setting it up, covering the walls with crime-scene shots, maps, lists, organizing a roster for the tip line. The rest were out in the field, starting the long process of talking to anyone whose path had ever crossed the Spains’. One of them had tracked down Jack’s friends from preschool: most of them hadn’t heard from the Spains since June, when the school closed for the summer. One mother said Jack had come over a couple of times since then, to play with her son, but sometime in August Jenny had stopped returning her calls. The woman had added something about that not being like Jenny at all.