Police chiefs call for resignation of …

DI Hobbes blamed for …

Police Board to decide this week …

Oh, the poor lad, poor Martin: it didn’t bear thinking about.

His hand parted from Glenda’s, and he said again, ‘I’ll find him.’

It was enough. A promise.

The Stranger

Late night, no hope of sleeping. He had laid out a few photographs – the only ones he owned – on the coffee-table in his living room. One after another: Martin as a kid, knee-high to his dad, playing football. The usual fantasies – his son scoring a goal for England in the World Cup final. Happy families, holiday shots. The kid alone, growing shy as he got older, often turning away from the camera. He had his mother’s good looks, thank God. Hobbes allowed himself a smile at that. And then his son with his friends, all male, not yet that interested in girls. In the final image Martin’s face was pained in some way, caught unawares.

Hobbes levered the cap off a bottle of beer.

Other thoughts intruding.

The light seemed to dim in his tiny room and he adjusted the reading lamp slightly, angling the beam.

Photographs. One image swapped for another. Why?

And then a spark flared in his mind.

That dress.

That bloody dress. The blood on the dress, on the torn and bloody dress.

His mind could not keep still, not tonight.

Yellow flowers, tiny flowers, so many of them on the blue cloth.

Spots of red on the yellow, the blood …

His mind clicking on the various sightings, one room after another, the same dress, the same design, over and over. Fifteen dresses, nearly the same number of scarves, and then the shoes, the stockings. Add it all up. How many, in total? Maybe fifty items altogether. Leonard Graves laying them all out one by one, a patient old man at work. The pills and the vodka. And then Hobbes happened by chance upon a memory, as before, when Latimer had first shown him the dress laid out on the floor of the living room. His own past, a similar thing, but years ago, years, he couldn’t quite place it …

He stopped his thoughts right there and stared at the photograph he was holding.

This was the new image, the one Martin had slotted into the album. It showed his son and a friend, a woman this time, but older than him by a good few years, somebody new. Late twenties, maybe more. Hard to tell. One arm draped over his son’s shoulders, the other stretched out before her towards the camera. Smiling broadly. Martin also. A joke shared. A fragment of graffiti on a wall behind them: BAN THE. The photograph was taken recently, Martin looking older than Hobbes remembered, his hair longer. The thinness that Glenda had mentioned. A T-shirt with a Public Image Ltd logo on it.

This woman. Who was she?

He held the photo under the light and stared at the stranger’s face intently. And then at her outstretched hand. The fingertips. The colour of them.