As she sat there, a blob of red appeared to signify that she’d received a private message.

She opened it, and her whole body went rigid with cold.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10
Patrick – Day 2

Air. He needed air. But he was unable to tear himself away from the wall where pictures of the three missing children were posted. He corrected himself – two missing, one missed. He hadn’t seen the parents of Isabel Hartley since they’d been told the terrible news, was saving that particular ordeal till the next day. How would they cope? Isabel was their only child and he knew the answer to his question: they wouldn’t. How could you cope with something like that? Sure, they would probably carry on living, most likely for another fifty years. They might go on to have more children, together or with new people. They would go on living – but their lives as they knew them had ended this afternoon when one of Patrick’s team had sat them down and spoken to them with a soft voice.

The press conference had ended an hour ago. The room had been silent apart from the click of cameras, the sounds of shuffling and the reporter from The Sun hacking away with a dry cough. But as soon as Patrick had finished speaking, the Sun reporter, whose name was Harry Carlson, asked if it was true that Isabel had been found on the Crane Park gypsy camp, as he put it, and the room erupted. Now it was all over the web and the hotline was going crazy. There were nineteen official traveller sites in Surrey plus a lot more private and illegal encampments. People who lived around every one of them were now calling in with reports of seeing travellers with small children in tow.

Patrick sat down at his desk and plugged his headphones in, bringing up his iTunes playlist and choosing one of The Cure’s lighter albums, The Head on the Door, the music helping to soothe his mind and get his neurons firing. Listening to the tracks he’d loved when he was a teenager made him feel young. It was as if he was tricking his brain into believing it was the agile mind of a nineteen year old, but with the experience and knowledge of a man twice that.

He took out his Moleskine notepad and opened it to the next blank page. His colleagues smirked when they saw it, and he knew it was an affectation, but it still irritated him when Winkler called him Dickens, or sometimes JK – the only bloody writers he had heard of, probably.

The notepad was full of scribbles, thoughts, questions, a tangle of information that had become so knotted and jumbled that he felt lost. He needed to step back, make some clear notes to sort out what he knew and, more importantly, what he didn’t yet know.

On the blank page, he started a list.