He walked back to his car, imagining how sick it would make Lennon if Winkler cracked this case. He knew Lennon was convinced that the stepsister, a foxy little piece of jailbait, was lying, that she and her boyfriend had been up to something. Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that while the parents were out, the daughter was indulging in some heavy more-than-petting with her chavvy bloke. He also knew that Lennon had abandoned that line of inquiry. So what if the daughter had been breaking the law in her bedroom while the little kid was being snatched? Did it make any difference? Well, what if this boyfriend had something to do with it? Yeah, it was unlikely, unless he had some connection to the other two kids as well. What about the parents? Cases, like this, the parents were usually involved. Maybe there was some kind of weird connection between the three sets of parents, like . . . they were all members of a Satan-worshipping cult who had sacrificed their kids in return for money and success. Weirder things had happened.

He took a look at himself in the rearview mirror, blew himself a kiss, then drove off whistling, Helen’s Facebook log-in hot in his back pocket.

Chapter 21

Chapter 21
Patrick – Day 4

Patrick transferred the bunch of lilies briefly into his armpit, and wiped his palms on his legs. He felt like a fourteen-year-old going on his first ever date, except that the excitement his teenage self would have been experiencing had been syringed out of him, to be replaced by a flat white panic. He had bought the lilies from the M&S at his local petrol station at nine that morning wondering, as he paid for them, if Gill still liked lilies. Wondering if she would still like him, and whether he even cared. He tried to see everything through her eyes – had he owned these jeans when she last saw him? Would she think he’d aged, or that the Buzzcocks retro T-shirt he wore was too young for him? She wouldn’t have seen this T-shirt before.

Would he start mentally comparing her to Suzanne Laughland when he saw her? He twirled the unfamiliar-feeling wedding ring around the fourth finger of his left hand. He’d had to search through all the drawers of the bedside units in his mum’s spare room to find it, and then polish it with a jewellery-cleaning cloth so Gill wouldn’t be able to tell that he hadn’t worn it for over a year. Would she still be wearing hers? Why was he worrying about it?