‘Perfectly good might be stretching it,’ Nicky replied. ‘Personally, I’d rather not take the risk of getting trapped in a coffin-sized box that’s dangling sixty feet in the air. Not in this building, anyway. Besides,’ she added, ‘the exercise is good for us.’

Fleet registered the pronoun. ‘Very tactful, Detective Sergeant.’

Nicky turned to hide her smile.

‘So what do you think?’ Fleet asked when they were another flight lower.

‘About Ben? I think it’s no wonder he acted out. His real mother dies when he’s just a kid, he’s raised by a deadbeat dad – who had even less sense than money, it seems. And there were no other relatives, right? No uncles, aunts, grandparents?’

‘None who were on the scene at the time, apparently. It was just Ben and his father. And his stepmother, of course.’

Nicky made a face, showing exactly what she thought of Christine Johnson. She was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘Does that make the situation better, would you say? Or worse? You know, the fact that, twenty-two years later, there’s nobody left to care. Assuming anybody really cared about Ben in the first place,’ she added dourly.

Fleet wasn’t sure how to answer that. And he wasn’t sure if Ben having no surviving family made their job easier, or harder. Perhaps they should have been grateful that they hadn’t needed to break the news to a grieving mother and father, but at least if Ben’s biological parents had survived, they might have been able to offer some insight into Ben’s true character, the relationships he’d forged at school … anything that might have provided some clue as to who might have wanted their son dead.

‘Do you know what strikes me the most?’ said Nicky, as they reached the bottom of the stairs. She gripped the handle of the door that would lead them outside, but hesitated before pulling it. ‘How sad Ben must have been. How unhappy.’

Fleet nodded. He’d been pondering the same thing himself. The boy had no refuge, no place in the world he would have felt safe. And from the sound of it, it had been that way for him throughout his entire life.

‘So maybe we should start there,’ Fleet said. ‘Not with who might have hated Ben. Rather, with how desperate he must have been to be loved.’

Ben – February 1997

(Three months before his death)

They were waiting for Ben in the corridor outside his classroom.