‘I’ve just come from home.’ He couldn’t say that he couldn’t bear lying to his wife any more. But he certainly couldn’t bear telling her the truth. ‘Any news on Malcolm Kerr?’

‘I’ve got men watching his car at Partington,’ she said. He wondered where Vera was. He thought he could hear gulls in the background. ‘I doubt he’d be daft enough to turn up for it, but I don’t suppose he’ll be thinking straight now.’

‘Do you need me back at the station?’ When there was no immediate answer Joe continued, ‘I might go into town, see if I can find our Jessie.’ He could tell he sounded pathetic, but he couldn’t stand hanging around the station, not able to concentrate, jumping every time his phone went, his head full of images of knives and blood.

‘Aye, why don’t you do that?’ Vera said. He thought she just wanted him out of the way. She believed that he wouldn’t function properly with his mind on his daughter.

‘Don’t you care about her?’ A bellow. ‘A possible witness to a murder, and the suspect on the loose?’ As soon as he’d spoken he knew that was unforgivable. The one thing they all knew about Vera Stanhope was that she cared. And she probably had the same pictures in her head as he did.

He thought she was going to let rip with a fury that would tear him apart, but there was such a long silence on the other end of the phone that he imagined she’d hung up on him in disgust.

‘You do what you think best, pet. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.’ Her voice quiet with pity. And guilt.

He drove back to Mardle, pulled back there by a kind of magnetic field. He had a vague plan to get on the Metro at the end of the line, because perhaps Kerr was fooling them all and was just riding the trains. In the crowds it would be a good place to hide. And the Metro would take him into town, and that was the last place that Jessie had been seen.

His phone rang. It was Sal. His pulsed raced. Jess would be home, safe and well. But Sal only had the same question. ‘Any news?’ Her voice hoarse and desperate.

‘I’m on my way into town,’ he said. ‘I’ll find her. Don’t worry.’ Before she spoke again, he cut off her call because he didn’t need her misery as well as his own, and he didn’t think he could pretend any longer that everything was okay.

The Metro car park was full and he ended up stopping in Harbour Street, just across the road from the church.