Craig Shaw’s file summary flicked up on the screen. A dozen entries, mainly arrests and cautions, but also a couple of convictions. Drugs. Such small-time stuff that the very lack of ambition was depressing. Selling blow on a couple of university campuses, amphetamines in a nightclub. One gram of coke. One bloody gram. He got eighteen months for that, suspended. A while later, the same thing. Two years this time. Out in less than one.

Mugshot: face so thin he looked malnourished. An arrogant stare, something self-assured about the way he held his head up. And he was an ugly runt. Ugly and unpleasant. Merchant was probably right: who was going to be bothered that he’d gone missing?

He drummed his fingers on the desk. Mrs Shaw rings the police a couple of days after her drug-dealing son disappears. The twenty-five-year-old son who presumably still lives at home. Now his mum’s worried sick. The whole thing was like a Johnny Cash song.

Reining in his prejudice, he reminded himself of the official definition of a missing person: Anyone whose whereabouts is unknown, whatever the circumstances… obligation to protect the rights of citizens without discriminating on any grounds. He scrolled up the file, saw the address.

‘Really?’

What else was he going to do of a Thursday night?

3

The Brick. Unusual name for a pub. He took his pint and went to stand outside the front doors. The light in the sky was fading fast, and there was an annoying February wind. In Leeds there’s always an annoying wind, unless there isn’t, then you wish there was. Either way, the weather’s always just a little bit shit. On the door was a poster, handwritten in thick black marker pen on bright orange paper: a DJ on Friday, a band on Saturday. What might have been, eh, Joe?

Across the road from the pub was a strip of grass that sloped upwards, long and irregular, too steep to be of any use. Beyond it were half a dozen rows of back-to-back houses running all the way up the hillside, their chimney stacks jet-black against the evening sky. They were larger than average for the area. Good solid stuff. Turn of the century. The previous century.

He sank a third of his pint. IPA? Bitter? He couldn’t remember what he’d ordered. It had the reassuring aroma of dusty rags and sweet mould. Real ale, the taste of his youth. Young lads today? Hardly any of ’em drank this stuff. He studied the pint glass in his hand. A young lad? Forty-eight hours he’d been gone. Could you even class that as missing? It was a decent bender, was all. Mum didn’t think so, though.