His voice was as thick as tar. ‘Hello, Helena. I was just wondering if Julian was fine?’

‘No,’ she had screamed at him. ‘Julian is not fine. He was picked up from school earlier by someone claiming to be his uncle. Was that you?’

There had been silence on the other end of the line. Infuriating silence.

‘Well?’

‘No.’ The reply had been quiet, but there had been unmistakable quiver in Dominique’s voice. Helena had felt her head spinning into oblivion. ‘No, that wasn’t me.’

‘You know something, Dominique. You’ve ignored me for almost a decade, then you start hounding me about Julian. Now he goes missing. What’s going on?’

‘I . . . I don’t know, but . . .’

‘Dominique! Don’t bullshit me!’

There had been more swearing, more questions and more denials. Then Helena had hung up. Of course, she had told the policewoman everything. They would check it out, straightaway. That had been an hour ago.

It broke her heart: Julian was nothing more than a piece of paper on somebody’s desk, along with hundreds of other pieces of paper, each with their own miserable story to tell.

‘Oh, Julian,’ she whispered. ‘Come back to me.’

Chapter 59

Chapter 59

Rowlinson’s BWM had built-in blue lights and a siren and both were blaring as they hit the motorway and accelerated hard into the fast lane. There hadn’t been time to organise any proper backup; the others had been ordered to stay behind in case they were wrong and Karl Jones returned home.

Rowlinson finished his conversation with Missing Persons and reported it back to Priest grimly.

‘Julian was reported as missing late this afternoon when his mother attended school to pick him up and found he’d already gone. The school say a man came to collect him at lunchtime fitting Jones’s description. The school were pretty lax about it. Jones said he was the kid’s uncle and he had a letter from the mother. No doubt a few jobs will be lost on that one.’

He nodded and returned to the red folder. He had taken the diary from Karl’s house and had skimmed most of it while they negotiated their way out of Greater London, hoping it would give them something to work on.

The girl closes her eyes and thinks of the church spire, just visible beyond the trees. On a clear day, the girl can stand on boxes piled on top of each other and reach the windowsill. From there she can see out across the valley and to the top of the church. She finds comfort in this simple image, just an upside-down ice cream cone above a tree. But it makes her calm. It gives her hope. In there, God is waiting for her.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Rowlinson.

‘To a place called Devil’s Point.’

‘Why there?’