This wasn’t news to Will. Thanks to the little information he’d gleaned from his visit to the Langs, he’d managed to identify the adoption agency in question, but he was too late. It had folded years earlier, when new legislation made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of religious beliefs. Its records had been archived with a firm of solicitors. Will had visited their office and spent hours searching through boxes of paper until he found the documents pertaining to the child who had been registered as Alice Catharine Lang. The signatory on the adoption papers was one Sylvia Riley, from Hastings in East Sussex. Further investigation revealed that Mrs Riley worked for the adoption agency as an administrator and regularly acted as signatory when one was required for the purpose of formalising some legal process in loco parentis. The fact that Alice’s mother hadn’t signed the adoption papers herself meant she was either physically or mentally incapable of doing so, or underage. It also implied that Alice’s mother’s parents hadn’t wanted their names associated with the baby; they’d distanced themselves from the matter entirely. Will had tracked Mrs Riley to her last registered address, a neat, modern house on an estate on the outskirts of Hastings, but discovered that she had died. She was survived by a husband and two daughters, but they were unable to shed any light on Alice’s story.

Somewhere about that time, although he had no proof whatsoever, Will had an inkling of an idea about who Alice’s birth mother might have been, someone who would have been a young teenager at the time of Alice’s birth and a devout Christian, but he dismissed it. It seemed too great a coincidence; it could not be true.

Will heard a rattling from downstairs, and then the sound of a vacuum cleaner starting up. Mr Bradshaw was cleaning the hallway, banging the machine against the skirting so deliberately that Will was certain his landlord was trying to annoy him into going out.

Fuck him.

He closed the laptop and heard the ‘ping’ of an incoming message on his phone. It was a text from Emily, the journalist. Will opened the message and skim-read it.

Good news! I’ve found something about Guy deV!!!