‘She was found on the traveller camp in Twickenham. Although we don’t know if she was—’ he mouthed the word killed ‘—there, or just dumped there afterwards. Keep it to yourself till after the news tonight, won’t you.’

That particular nugget of information would cause immediate chaos at Bonnie’s playgroup, if Mairead let it slip, he thought. But he knew his mother was discreet enough not to leak it. Everyone would know soon enough.

‘Go and find your shoes, Bonnie, there’s a good girl. You can have your sandwich in the car as a special treat.’

Bonnie ran out into the hall, and Mairead turned to face her son. ‘Oh Pat. That’s just awful.’

He nodded. ‘I know. And this is just the start of it. There are still two kids missing out there.’

Chapter 9

Chapter 9
Helen – Day 2

Helen knew that many people would find it odd, suspicious even, that she had come to do a workout today, but she’d had to get out of their temporary refuge, their neighbours the Jamesons, next door.

At the gym, in this air-conditioned artificially lit space, pounding hard on the treadmill, the pain in her lungs and the thud of her heart muted the desperate voice in her head, the voice that cried out Frankie’s name in a perpetual anguished loop.

The terror of someone harming the perfect flesh of her only child was unendurable. What would she do, if that was the case? What if the next tiny body found dumped like rubbish, like Isabel Hartley’s had been, was Frankie’s?

She missed Frankie so much that she thought her head would explode. And now the terrible news about Isabel made everything twenty – no, a hundred times – worse.

The woman with the frizzy greyish hair had told them. Sandra? Sarah? Helen just thought of her as the FLO, the Family Liaison Officer, a faceless but well-meaning police woman who apparently now had to hang around them, getting in the way and making sure – what? Making sure they weren’t keeping Frankie captive in the garden shed? Making sure they weren’t sneaking out under cover of darkness to bury her stiff body?

‘Just to make sure you’re OK,’ the woman had said when she first moved into the Jamesons’ place with them. As if they could be OK, with Frankie missing, and their own house a taped-off crime scene.