He kissed the back of Laura’s neck and she recoiled, her stomach churning.

‘Your hair,’ he said, inhaling the back of her head as she strained to free herself. ‘So soft. Just like hers.’

He removed his hand from Laura’s mouth and wrapped a lock of her hair around it, caressing the back of her neck. She froze, every part of her body paralysed with fear. Was he going to rape her?

And then he yanked her hair back so hard she felt the roots rip from her head.

‘Fucking whore!’ he yelled and, lifting Laura up by the waist, he carried her out of the house.

She didn’t start fighting again until he opened the boot of the car and flung her in. Then she lashed out, trying to keep her limbs extended so he couldn’t close the boot. He leaned in and grabbed her by the throat.

‘Stop fucking squirming or I’ll strangle you right now, bitch.’

Laura dropped her hands and legs, terrified. She couldn’t win in this scenario. She wouldn’t survive if she tried to fight him in the car. She had to do what he said.

He slammed the boot shut and she was in the dark again.

CHAPTER 33

Willie drove as Tom spoke to a contact on the phone. She was a social worker and had gone over and above to give the inspector a dig out. He’d recently helped her deal with a toe-rag of a father who’d been sent down for battering his wife to death thirteen years previously, while their one-year-old son watched. Out of jail for ‘good behaviour’, he’d started harassing the now-teenage child’s foster parents, looking for access. The social worker knew he was on hard drugs. Tom, who’d handled the initial murder inquiry, intervened with a particularly hard-hitting report to the man’s probation officer and the father’s early release had been revoked.

The social worker felt she owed Tom one.

‘It’s a tragic case, I can see why your suspect altered his name,’ she said, as the inspector listened. ‘The extended family were extremely wealthy at one stage, but they lost it all. Still had a large house and a bit of land, though. His mother lived at home with her father, the boy’s grandfather, but she was troubled. Alcohol problems. She had a record for soliciting, on top of a litany of petty crimes. Anyhow, she got pregnant and tried to clean up, apparently. There’s no dad on the birth cert. And he wasn’t her only child – she’d another son, a few years later. He had some sort of birth defect and died young. That must have knocked her off the wagon. Especially as they believed it was something she did in pregnancy that caused the defect, either drinking or drug-taking, I imagine. When the eldest boy was ten, she walked out. Abandoned her son to his grandfather.