The police had always suspected that Doyle’s girlfriend, Denise Breem, had helped him abduct the girls by luring them to the house. She, or someone matching her description, had been seen hanging around the school in the days immediately before the two girls were murdered. But there was no evidence, she denied everything and, with Doyle dead, it was impossible to make a case against her. To the sickened frustration of every officer involved, they’d had to let her go. With no charges, she wasn’t on any registers and her record was clean.

‘What do we know about her?’ Patrick asked. ‘She was twenty-four at the time, so she’s thirty-one now. Brought up on the Kennedy Estate, both parents on long-term sick, her dad, by all accounts, a violent, drunken scumbag. Denise left school at sixteen, no qualifications, a couple of convictions for shoplifting to her name.’

‘Wasn’t there some . . . incident with her sister?’ Carmella asked.

‘Well remembered. Yes, when Denise was fourteen, her ten-year-old sister was taken into care after social workers discovered that a friend of her parents, a guy called Steve McLean, had sexually assaulted her. McLean was living with the family at the time as their lodger. According to the reports from the time, the whole family blamed the little girl, as if she was some kind of Lolita and he was an innocent victim.’

Heads shook and voices murmured darkly around the room.

‘But the social workers didn’t think Denise was in any danger after McLean was put away, and Denise denied that he’d touched her too. When questioned about it when she was being interviewed about the Boyle case, Denise said her sister was “a little slut who was asking for it” . . . But none of that matters right now. All that matters is that Denise is the only person with any kind of record we can find on the list from the Eleven O’Clock Club that all three of our abducted children attended.’

‘What the hell was she doing there?’ Mike asked.

‘I’ll come to that in a moment,’ Patrick replied. ‘First, this afternoon I interviewed Bowie Hollister—’

He ignored the sniggers.

‘—a seven-year-old boy who says he saw Liam McConnell being taken from his mum’s Audi . . . by a woman.’ He explained the rest of what Bowie had said and as he spoke he could feel it: that buzz in the air, as it seemed that finally they were getting somewhere. ‘Bowie has been with a sketch artist here this afternoon. And this is what he came up with.’

Enjoying the theatricality of it, Patrick lifted the enlarged sketch from where it lay face down on the table and pinned it to the board beside the photo of Denise.

‘Fuck! It’s her,’ Mike said, as most of the other detectives in the room made similar noises.