DI Davies stood up and held on to the report, crushing it between his fingers as he went to refill his coffee cup.

‘Kevin Milne actually asked social workers to take him into care? This says that he was in a foster home for three weeks and then sent back to his psychotic mother. The boy tried to commit suicide but the hospital pumped his stomach and sent him back to Acacia Avenue.’ Davies threw the report down on the coffee table, where milk seeped into its pages and sugar stuck to the damp paper. ‘What the hell is the British taxpayer paying these bloody social workers for?’ he asked no one in particular, waving the report in the air. Social workers were DI Davies’s whipping boys. They were either colluding with criminals to get them off or they were letting down children. Sometimes he accused them of both in the same case. It was anyone’s guess which way this one would go. Sam joined him at the coffee table, took the report from his hand and read out loud a passage she had marked earlier.

‘The social worker said Renee Smith’s family is less chaotic, although her parents are also separated.’ She turned over a page and continued to read. ‘Renee is hyperactive and she has an older sister with learning difficulties so severe she cannot be educated in mainstream schooling. There’s a younger girl, too, that Renee seems to dote on.’

DI Davies lifted an eyebrow at the last remark and lit another cigarette. ‘Great. She’s a caring little bastard, then, when it comes to family. Am I meant to feel sorry for her?’ He offered his packet to Sam. She had given up six months before, but this case was straining her nerves beyond anything she had ever known. Sam Jones had escaped from somewhere very similar to Acacia Avenue when she was seventeen; none of her colleagues knew she had been raised in a viper’s nest akin to that of Kevin Milne and Renee Smith. Every cell in her body was shouting ‘there is no bloody excuse’, but she also knew how hard it was to escape.

‘Sam, read out the bit about Renee being abandoned,’ shouted Gerry from across the room as he stood at a huge white board of information. She flicked through some pages at his request. ‘The social work department was called in three years ago when the mother, Amanda Smith, went to Blackpool with a new boyfriend and left the children alone in the house for a week. Renee was seven.’ DI Davies was back sitting at Sam’s desk. He swore under his breath again and then put his head in his hands. He rubbed his palms up and down his face. ‘Are you sure they are the only ones on Dana Black’s list to have been absent from school the day Matthew Cook was taken?’