1. Isabel + travellers
2. Liam/Sainsbury’s
3. Frankie + family

He tapped the page with his pen, listening to Robert Smith sing about how yesterday he had felt so old, and began to write down the facts beneath the first heading, starting with Isabel’s disappearance, the fact she had been taken from her house, and then what he knew so far about her fate. But after a few lines he stopped, frustrated.

Yes, he knew she had been found by Wesley on the edge of the encampment six days ago – one day after she disappeared – and that she had been naked. From what he had seen, there were no obvious signs of how she had died, no visible wounds or injuries. He also knew that neither Wesley nor Mickey, whose details had been run through HOLMES, had any convictions beyond one twenty-year-old charge of GBH for Mickey when he had been involved in a fight in a pub. At the moment, two DCs were crunching the names of everyone else in the camp through the system, and so far nothing had come up.

He wrote ‘Need to eliminate travellers’ and underlined it. His gut told him that Mickey Flanagan was right: that the body had been left there deliberately to shift attention onto the travellers. There were two possible reasons for that. Reason one was that it was someone with a vendetta or some other reason to want to cause hellfire to rain down upon the travellers. But how did that tie in to the other missing children? Were they about to find the other kids’ bodies dumped on other traveller sites? He made another note to get that checked out, his stomach clenching as he wrote it, knowing how that would look, to both sides.

The vendetta idea seemed unlikely. Which left the most obvious reason: a diversionary tactic. The only problem with that was that it seemed so obvious and ill-thought-out. He drew a large, elaborate question mark on the paper. He needed to talk to the forensic pathologist, Daniel Hamlet, and was waiting to get the call from the mortuary.

He moved on to the second page. Liam and Sainsbury’s. It still astounded him that someone had managed to remove a child from a car in a busy supermarket car park without anyone noticing. No doubt they would be receiving calls right now from people claiming to have spotted a ‘dodgy gypsy’ lurking by the trolleys. But they had already been through the CCTV, which didn’t cover the McConnells’ car nor, to Patrick’s dismay, the entrance or exit of the car park. They had also been running appeals on TV and in local papers for anyone who had been in Sainsbury’s between 10 A.M. and noon on June 4th who had seen anyone carrying a small child to come forward, so far with no useful leads.