Patrick’s navvy-sized breakfast was plonked down before him and he squirted it with watery ketchup that had been poured into a Heinz bottle, giving it ideas above its station. ‘Er – no.’ He jabbed a corner of toast into his fried egg, breaking the surface and causing the yolk to ooze across the plate. Carmella wrinkled her nose. ‘Everything OK at home, yeah?’

Her shoulders drooped. ‘Everything is rosy.’

‘Cool. I just thought you seemed a bit . . .’ Could she tell how awkward he felt? ‘Emotional.’ He cringed at his choice of word.

‘Hmm. Well, I am a woman. We tend to get a bit emotional every now and then.’

‘Sorry.’

She smiled at him. ‘Everything’s fine, honest. Nothing for you to worry your pretty big head about. Let’s talk about the investigation, can we? I thought you had all the answers in your magic notebook.’

He gulped tea and looked around to make sure no one was ear-wigging. ‘I wish. But, so far, what has this case turned up? No DNA, no decent witnesses, no suspects.’

‘What about the travellers?’

‘We’ll carry on interviewing them all, but I believe Wesley Hewson when he says Isabel was dumped there and that he hid her because he knew the travellers would get the blame.’ He took a bite of sausage. ‘We need to know the motive. What connects the children? The amount of risk the abductor took tells me that these kids weren’t selected randomly.’

Carmella shuffled her chair as an old man with whiskery ears squeezed past, the chair legs scraping painfully on the hard floor. ‘But all the children are so different. Two girls and a boy. None of them look alike.’

‘The only thing they have in common is area, and their ages. They live in a three-mile radius of each other. They’re all between two and three. And all their parents are well off.’

‘No ransom demand, though.’

Patrick sat back, fighting the urge to burp. ‘We need to find where the lives of the three families intersect. If we draw a Venn diagram of everything we know about the Hartleys, the Philips family and the McConnells, there might be something in the point where they meet that tells us why these kids were targeted.’

‘I’m guessing you’ve already got a Venn diagram drawn in your notebook.’

He smiled. ‘Yeah. But there’s nothing in any of the intersections.’