With an enormous, visible effort she controlled a fresh eruption of tears, holding her trembling lips together and pressing the tissues hard across her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she said:

“Ray’s got a theory. He wanted to tell the police, but they didn’t care, they were more interested in where he’d been when she was—but Ray’s got a friend called Ritchie who puts a bit of gardening his way, see, and Kelsey met Ritchie—”

The theory was rolled out with a huge amount of extraneous detail and repetition. Strike, who was well used to the rambling style of unpracticed witnesses, listened attentively and politely.

A photograph was produced out of a dresser drawer, which did double duty in proving to Strike that Ray had been with three friends on a stag weekend in Shoreham-by-Sea when Kelsey was killed, and also revealed young Ritchie’s injuries. Ritchie and Ray sat on the shingle beside a patch of sea holly, grinning, holding beers and squinting in the sunlight. Sweat glistened on Ray’s bald pate and illuminated young Ritchie’s swollen face, his stitches and bruising. His leg was in a surgical boot.

“—and, see, Ritchie came round here right after he’d had his smash and Ray thinks it put the idea in her head. He thinks she was planning to do something to her leg and then pretend she’d had a traffic accident.”

“Ritchie couldn’t be the boyfriend, could he?” asked Strike.

“Ritchie! He’s a bit simple. He’d have told us. Anyway, she barely knew him. It was all a fantasy. I think Ray’s right. She was planning to do something to her leg again and pretend she’d come off some boy’s bike.”

It would have been an excellent theory, thought Strike, if Kelsey had been lying in hospital, pretending to have suffered a motorbike accident and refusing to give more details under the pretense of protecting a fictitious boyfriend. He did Ray the credit of agreeing that this was exactly the kind of plan a sixteen-year-old might have come up with, mingling grandiosity and short-sightedness in dangerous measure. However, the point was moot. Whether or not Kelsey had once planned a fake motorbike crash, the evidence showed that she had abandoned the plan in preference for asking Strike for instructions on leg removal.

On the other hand, this was the first time that anyone had drawn any connection between Kelsey and a motorcyclist, and Strike was interested in Hazel’s absolute conviction that any boyfriend must be fictional.

“Well, there was hardly any boys on her childcare course,” said Hazel, “and where else was she going to meet him? Niall. She’d never had a boyfriend at school or anything. She went to the counselor and sometimes she went to the church up the road, they’ve a youth group, but there’s no Niall-with-a-motorbike there,” said Hazel. “The police checked, asked her friends if they knew anything. Darrell who runs the group, he was that upset. Ray saw him this morning on his way home. Says Darrell burst into tears when he saw him from across the road.”