‘You look shattered.’ His partner, DS Carmella Masiello, looked over at him. It was just past eleven P.M., and DI Patrick Lennon was giving Carmella a lift to the new-build apartment she shared with her other partner, Jenny. He wondered if she knew how much he envied her. His own home life couldn’t have been more different.

‘Your eyes – they look a little like a basset hound’s.’

‘Thanks, Carmella. You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself. I was told once that I have sleepy eyes, and that it’s sexy.’

He temporarily angled the rearview mirror towards himself so he could see his own eyes. He did look knackered. He hadn’t been taking care of himself, not the way Gill used to – she was always buying him eye serums and moisturisers that he felt embarrassed using. ‘But you don’t want to ruin your good looks,’ she would say, further embarrassing him. He was six foot two, with brown hair and matching eyes, and he’d been told he looked more like an alt-country singer than a cop. He didn’t believe it though – he didn’t think he was anything special and neither, apparently, did his partner.

Carmella’s laughter drowned out a whole chorus and half a verse of the Cure song that was playing on the car stereo. ‘There’s a difference between sleepy and knackered,’ she said when she finally got hold of herself.

‘There’s also a big difference between having me as a partner and having Winkler.’

‘You wouldn’t!’

He smiled, then remembered what they’d been talking about, and why he was so tired, and the smile vanished into the shadows with all the ghosts.

Seven days ago on June 2nd, three-year-old Isabel Hartley, known to the public as Izzy since the tabloids had shortened her name for the sake of their headlines, had been taken from the living room of her family home in Richmond, where she was watching TV. Isabel’s dad Max had been out the front, waxing his beloved car. Then he got an important call from work on his mobile and went inside, leaving the front door open, and up the stairs to his office to dig out some papers. He was up there for twenty minutes. When he came back downstairs, Isabel was no longer in the living room. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.