‘Someone needs to. I should have stopped them taking her. It wasn’t like I was asleep and they sneaked in. I confronted them. I had a chance to stop this.’

‘And you were lucky you didn’t get killed. At least Josie will have a father to come back to.’

They hugged. As he turned, he found Middleton watching from a doorway for a second time that day. This time Anna’s father didn’t vanish, though. He waved his mobile. ‘I’ve just had a call, Jane. A break-in at my garage. I need to go talk to the security company. Will you be okay here?’

She nodded. ‘There are still people to call. I need to be here when Josie comes back. And Anna.’

He nodded. And left without a word. His car was pulling away as Nick exited the house.

On the pavement, Nick stopped to take in the empty spaces on the street, where some of the visitors to the house had parked. But those people had gone now: the Family Liaison Officer, the search team, the forensics team; one by one they had left, probably to continue their jobs at a station or lab. And the foul detective, Nabi, had been sent away by his boss to chase up a dangling end on some other investigation. Their absence at the house, the settling quiet in the rooms, had begun to give a feeling of wind-down, of finality, like a stabling of the air. Like the endgame. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this trip to the scrapyard, where answers, and his family, might be kept, would be where that stable air was disrupted, and the storm would open up to play out the final act in this drama. Closure was drawing close.

But a happy ending wasn’t guaranteed.

Eleven

A few miles outside Northampton was Harpole, and half a mile north of it was Watson-Bruce Salvage, nestled in woods and fields and boxed in by a hill and two roads that met in an L-shape. Apart from a desert oasis of running liquid gold, the last thing Nick expected to see on the smaller of those two tracks was what they came across in a large lay-by around a bend.

Four, he counted: vans. Six: cars. Four: motorbikes, two of them off-road machines, and like their riders conspicuous because they didn’t have Northamptonshire Police livery.