He scrabbled about in oil-stained filing cabinets and chests of drawers. He sifted through stray nuts and bolts, spare parts and mislaid drill bits but found nothing of significance. After about twenty minutes of pointless searching through the neatest garage he’d ever seen, Jack stepped out into the fresh air. Boys on bikes circled just outside, looking over his shoulder to see if the garage contained anything worth stealing.

“What sort of car was in here last?”

The biggest kid got £5 out of Jack before telling him about the bus. Once he’d paid up, Jack pinched the brow of his nose, waiting for a recent memory to come back to him; then he headed at a jog back toward the entrance to the flats. To the left of the main door was a narrow space where five large bins were stored—four black, one blue. Behind the black bins was a sheltered dry spot of ground being used by at least two homeless people. Blankets and sleeping bags were rolled up against the wall, together with a rucksack and a pile of tatty, ripped old foam squares that Jack expected would be laid out into a mattress at night. These foam squares were the memory he was searching for—he’d seen them in Connie’s house.

Jack flipped the lid on the bins to reveal more squares of foam—dirtier, smaller, more torn. The rough sleepers had certainly salvaged the best ones. He took out his mobile and snapped some photos before racing back to Rob’s garage. He’d left the door wide open and the gannet children were swarming.

Back in Angela’s flat, Jack called Ridley. He was cautious about going to him with another hunch, but a hunch was all he had. He requested that someone check into a bus purchase made by Robert Chuke, and he told Ridley about the foam squares. He’d already googled different types of vehicle seat stuffing, and his theory was that if the women had emptied the seats, then it had to be because they were putting something else in. He had no idea if twenty-five seats would hold £27 million, but Angela was a talented seamstress, so it could fit. These women weren’t criminals who’d be escaping on a private jet; they were ordinary people who would use their innate skills to their best advantage—driving out the country in a second-hand bus with a couple of kids in tow seemed typically “them.”

In the time it took Ridley to say “leave it to me,” Jack had had another thought.

“Sir, did the Chester police get a list of the kids at Julia’s place?”

When Jack came off the phone from Ridley, he went back into the flat.

“This doesn’t look like a search,” he said to the uniforms as he looked around the lounge. “This looks like you’ve ransacked the place! Someone lives here! Tidy it up.”

He stepped back out onto the balcony and logged into HOLMES, scrolling through the list of kids found to be living at Julia’s. He wasn’t certain what he was looking for but when he’d thought about Angela absconding with her children, even taking the memories of her dead baby, he’d remembered Julia saying she’d die for those kids . . . and yet she’d just left them all behind?