There was no sense of familiarity as she walked through the doors of West Hampstead Police Station. Too many years had passed. It didn’t matter, Jodie knew why she was there and what she wanted. She wanted assurances from the family liaison, be that Emma Carlton or her successor, that Victor was no threat to her. Jodie wanted them to arrange a meeting with him where she could discuss their shared unfortunate past and lay to bed any worries that he was implicated in her trouble at work. Maybe he’d confess to leaving the baby shoes for some strange reason of his own. He’d apologise, promise to leave her alone, and that would be that.

That was what she wanted.

What she got was shockingly different.

17

Emma Carlton had been a relatively inexperienced twenty-six-year-old when she’d been appointed family liaison for the Armstrongs. Almost thirty years in the service had changed her physically and mentally. Several years before, when her drinking had given her cause for concern, she’d successfully broken the bad habit of using alcohol to combat stress and had taken up running. As with her drinking, she took it to excess and as a result her physique was wiry, her face gaunt and her skin wrinkled from too many hours in the sun.

Running had allowed her to cope with the stress of her job, but the cause of it remained. The endless stories of sorrow and suffering, the terrible pain that one person had inflicted on another, sometimes simply because they could… they all gnawed away at the part of her that had once believed in the basic decency of people. Now, there was little of that faith in people left.

She’d been promoted to manager a few years before. It had reduced the stress a little; nowadays she spent more of her time in the office than out in the field. Reading the reports rather than hearing them, however, didn’t diminish their power to disturb.

It had been a few years since she’d accepted a new case but she continued to manage her older ones, few of which required more than the occasional meeting to discuss a perpetrator’s release. She was used to parole officers, the police and various other disciplines contacting her for information regarding certain cases, but it was rare for a victim to turn up after so many years to seek the same.

‘You want to know where Victor Hill is currently living?’ Emma had met all sorts in her career. The rather garbled, and certainly tangled account of medication errors and baby shoes made her look at Jodie with carefully assessing eyes. Sometimes a normal exterior, like the one she was portraying so well, was a cover for a twisted interior.