Fifteen minutes later the gate opened and a burly man stood there holding out Talbin’s camera and equipment bag.

He snatched it and took the time to check that the memory cards were still there. They were in the right order, which wasn’t the order of the dates on them, so he didn’t think they’d been touched. They were much more important than the camera, which didn’t look as if it had been opened and viewed. But there was nothing on it that really mattered.

Chapter Twenty

When the police closed in on Gail, she yelled abuse and waved the knife at them. Its blade shone in the light from the caged, fly-specked fluorescent tube near the door. They immediately took their batons and shook them out. Since she was waving her knife around and staggering slightly, they soon managed to knock it out of her hand and cuff her.

‘Where are the children?’ one asked her.

‘How the hell should I know? They ran off. Ouch! Let go of me.’

Another officer brought Tom over to them and Gail looked at him pleadingly. ‘Tom, don’t let them do this to me. Tom, you’re my husband. You’ve got to help me!’

‘Where are the children, Gail?’

‘I told you, they ran off. I don’t know. It’s dark out there. They could be anywhere.’

‘We’d better check out the ladies’ she was hiding in first,’ the officer said. ‘You never know.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Tom! Tom, come back.’

He ignored Gail’s yells and pleas, loathing her so much for putting the children at risk that he couldn’t bear even to stand near her.

‘Has she been on drugs?’ the man next to him asked. ‘That’s a strong reaction for just alcohol.’

‘She did try smoking pot a while back, but it didn’t agree with her. She went so violent, I had to take her to hospital. Psychotic incident, they called it. I threatened to throw her out of the house if she ever touched it again, but it’d frightened her so much she stopped using it.’

‘It affects some people that way, for all they claim it’s safe. She’s not good with alcohol either, is she?’

They arrived at the public convenience. ‘Let me go first.’ Tom went inside, staring round, seeing no one. ‘Hayley? Ryan? Are you there?’

A voice quavered from one of the cubicles. ‘Daddy? Please don’t be mad at us.’

With a sob of sheer relief, Tom flung open the cubicle door and found two tear-stained children standing on top of the toilet seat so that their feet didn’t show, arms round one another. Scooping them up in his arms, he covered them with kisses. ‘Of course I’m not mad at you. I love you both to pieces. You know that.’

The officer slipped outside to let people know the children were found, then came back and tapped Tom on the shoulder. ‘I’ll carry one if you carry the other. They look like they need some TLC, and we’d better get them checked out by a doctor.’