Winkler stood in the station car park and watched Lennon and his bitch of a sidekick, Carmella, drive off in separate cars. He was still smarting from the way that lesbian had spoken to him in the meeting, but most of his fury was directed at Lennon. How the hell was he still the lead on this investigation? He couldn’t work out if he was actually fucking the DCI or if they merely had the hots for each other. It had to be one of those, and one of these days he was going to find out and expose the pair of them so everyone could see how corrupt this department was. But first, he was going to put Lennon in his place by finding the kid and showing the tattooed twat up for the crap cop he really was.

He drove home, made himself a cup of green tea – it was important to keep his body in tip-top condition – and sat down at the computer. He rested a hand on his belly, feeling his taut abs, and ran a hand through his lovely hair. Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble. He resisted the urge to visit the Japanese fetish site he’d become addicted to lately and went to Facebook, logging out of his own account then logging in, for the first time, as Helen Philips.

Lennon reckoned that the teenage duo, Alice and Larry, were responsible for what had happened to the kid but, like he’d said in the meeting, he couldn’t see them having the guts or gumption to pull that off. The girl would have crumpled during her first interview.

No, Winkler was now sure the parents were to blame. An accident, maybe. Or straightforward infanticide. Shit, you’d think Lennon would be able to spot a child-killer a mile off, being married to an attempted murderer. But look at the odds – in cases like this, after they’d discounted the neighbourhood child snatchers, it was always the parents. Behind that middle-class veneer of respectability, Sean and Helen Philips were hiding something dark. He could smell it on them. The thought of Helen, with that perfect peachy arse, having a wicked secret gave him a semi. Maybe he’d find some flesh-bearing shots on her Facebook page.

He was disappointed. Pretty much every picture in Helen’s Facebook albums was of Frankie, along with a load of pictures of bracelets she’d made in her spare time (all of them with tons of likes from her girly mates) or boring close-ups of bees and flowers she’d taken with ‘my fab new macro lens’ in the park. Interestingly, there weren’t many photos of Alice or Sean, apart from a few Christmas snaps in which Alice looked pouty and Sean appeared pie-eyed. There certainly weren’t any pictures that revealed her to be a member of a Satanic cult or anything juicy and incriminating like that.