‘Gosh, Google Earth is the nuts, isn’t it? Does it even show you the drunks slumped and ready to blab outside?’

‘I told you,’ I say. ‘I was on the…’

‘…copy desk,’ he finishes. ‘And I was the sugar plum fairy, once. Honest I was.’ Another crack into the silence. The minutes tick by.

‘So what’s the deal with the police,’ I mutter, shoulder prickling as Carly emerges, like a sprite, a thread of softest cloud. I lift my head, squashing her. Dominic’s eyes blaze at me.

‘You wouldn’t believe how deep the rot is,’ he says. ‘The grooming was engineered from the very start. And it was much more widespread than the original inquiry ever uncovered. At least that’s what I’ve got from one source. It starts and ends with that perverted captain…’

Carly unfurls around my head as I stare back at him. She’s light, like the cloud of frizz round Julie’s head. But she’s out. I can’t put her back in. Still my heart thuds; regular, trusting, unfamiliar.

‘He was the mastermind behind Baby Girl A,’ he continues. ‘Her mum was an ex of his, in all sorts of trouble with booze and drugs. The definition of vulnerable, textbook. That’s how they managed to get to a minor. It’s almost always someone known to the victims, isn’t it? Standard grooming, I suppose … sick as it is to say so.’

Crack, crack, crack goes his gum. I twist round, looking over my shoulder. There’s the bobble hat, motionless, peaceful, trusting.

‘I don’t understand,’ I murmur as Carly whispers in my ear, 213breath fogging the glass in front of me. He was killed in action, Pa, that loser, whoever he was, wasn’t he? K.I.A, they said. What’s that mean, I said. Money, Jason said. Spells Kia, Rach said. Like Mia. It’s a girl’s name.

‘The question is,’ Dominic mutters to himself behind me, ‘how do I prove the evidence against Minchin was deliberately buried? The grooming ring itself isn’t new.’

I breathe in, out, in, out on to the glass. That man, whoever he was, he’s been dead for years. Deader than dead. He was never alive, as far as I ever cared. Even Jason couldn’t remember his face if he saw it. Neither of us could.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say again, resting my head on the glass. ‘Which captain do you mean?’ Robert Leigh Parish, Carly whispers into my ear. Robert. Leigh. Parish.

‘Surely you went over that on the copy desk. He was the biggest of big fishes, if we’re to believe everything we’re told by anyone in authority. I mean, if people misspell Warchester so much…’ Dominic trails off as I whip round, Carly roaring in my ear.

‘You need to tell me,’ I croak, ‘what the captain did. Tell me…’