Five minutes later he was in the incident room, aware that his team were staring at the damp hair curling onto his collar as he wrote the names on the whiteboard – Sean, Helen, Alice, Frankie – and described to the team what they already knew. He had to dismiss a brief uncomfortable thought that they would all know he’d been so recently naked at work, chiding himself for the moment of self-consciousness when there was so much else at stake.

Someone had already hung an enlarged photo of Frankie alongside the pictures of Izzy and Liam, and Patrick let his gaze linger on it for the moment, inviting everyone to do the same. This was their focus. These children, their families. Sometimes, in the din that reverberated around cases like this, it was easy to forget that.

MIT9 was one of the Met’s twenty-four Murder Investigation Teams, all coming under the Homicide and Serious Crime Command. Despite their name, the MITs were not only responsible for investigating murder, but much of the other nasty shit that made Patrick wish his fantasy career as a rock star had got beyond a handful of terrible gigs in south-coast pubs. Manslaughter, serial rapes, infanticide, mass disaster – and missing persons cases where there was, to use the official language, ‘substantive reason to suspect life has been taken or under threat’. This was one line he would never repeat to the parents of the missing kids.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You all know the drill by now.’ He nodded at DS Staunton. ‘Mike, I want you to coordinate house-to-house. Remember, we want any suspicious or strange activity over the last week – anyone seen hanging around, checking out the Philipses’ house, anyone spotted sitting in a car or van outside the house. I don’t even need to tell you this.’

Mike said, ‘If it’s anything like the other two, no one will have seen a bloody thing.’

‘We might get lucky,’ piped up DI Adrian Winkler. Six-foot-two, with shoulder-length black hair, longer and thicker than Patrick’s own, and good-looking enough to complete the set of what most women were supposed to be interested in, Winkler was one of the other DIs on the team. His nickname was, inevitably, Fonzie, although it was more a sarcastic reference to the fact he thought he was the coolest man on earth than because he shared a surname with the actor who played the Fonz. ‘There might be a curtain-twitcher living next door. Nice shower, by the way?’

‘Better than nothing, thanks, Adrian,’ Patrick said flatly. ‘I want you coordinating the search teams, along with Preet.’

Winkler shot him daggers. ‘Oh come on, Pat, not the fucking search teams. All those do-gooders tramping through the park looking for clues when you know most of them would rather be forming a lynch mob. DC Gupta and I have a lot better things to do with our time, you know.’