Ending up in hospital hadn’t been part of the plan. Now, he dreamed. Soundlessly, endlessly.

His wife and parents sat at his bedside, waiting for him to wake up.

They had been called late at night.

After the incident at the train station, he had walked for a long time. Considered his options and then walked out into traffic at Switch Island.

A rather large lorry had hit him and left him like this.

Where he slept peacefully, without any clue that’s what he was doing.

They would sit with him, praying, hoping, pleading, for an outcome that was never going to happen.

At some point, a doctor with kind eyes and grey, thinning hair would take them into a room. Sit them down and ask them to make a decision.

And, they would make it.

Rob couldn’t play. He wouldn’t play.

He failed at Level One.

Twenty-Five

Mark was a little disappointed by the turnout, but it was becoming the norm now. Unless the story had already taken off, or had some juicy elements to it, very few actual news journalists would show up at this point. Now that everything revolved around twenty-four-hour rolling coverage, they could afford to crib the footage from local stations, without the need to send anyone up to cities outside of London.

He wondered if the attention would have been different if they’d told them it was connected to the death of Joanna. Or, more annoyingly, if the victim had been a pretty blonde girl from a middle-class family.

The press had been more interested in Joanna’s death anyway. This was a silly distraction from what they saw as the main story.

That said, he could still see there were a few cameras around the room. A smattering of print journalists sitting patiently waiting, before going on to the next story they’d be working on. For them, he imagined it was business as usual.

He could already hear some of them taking bets on which of the family would actually be the culprit.

Mark listened to them speculate, wondering how long it would be until Uncle Rich found himself in the middle of the odds. He couldn’t blame them – they weren’t wrong. It was one of those clichés that was actually true. In most cases he’d been involved with – however tangentially – it normally turned out to be someone close to the family. Usually a parent. Usually a male.

Something told him that this wasn’t the case here.

It was over twenty-four hours since Joanna’s body had been found. In that time, he’d taken Emily Burns’s family on a wasted identification and spent long hours reading endless conversations between Emily and various other teenagers. All of them nonsensical, ridiculous discussions, which always ended with threats and anger towards her. Once they’d discovered her true identity.