‘Of course.’ Eyre seemed offended. ‘But it was man grooms girls, kills girl whose pregnancy proves his guilt, involves other groomed girl, who is left traumatised by the whole experience.’

Bremer was silent, waiting for Eyre to continue.

‘We see it now more than we did back then,’ he went on, ‘organised groups grooming girls for sex parties. But back then it was all new to us. We tried hard to unpick it, but it felt like trying to find one end of a roll of wool from another. And of course social services were no help; they were too busy conducting their own internal review of what’d gone wrong to think about helping out the police.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Arse-covering reigned back then, especially where social services were concerned.’

‘It’s no different now,’ Bremer agreed.

‘So you never found out where she went?’ Carla asked.

Eyre turned to her. ‘No,’ he said, ‘by then the perp was behind bars and we had no need to look for her.’

‘You suggested to me earlier you always expected to hear about Mary again. Why was that?’

Eyre looked impressed she had remembered. ‘Because her story never quite added up. She was covered in blood – not her own, Aoife’s, as well as unknown DNA that seemed to link back to Aoife, but not sufficiently for us to prove another person was involved.’

Bremer frowned. ‘I don’t understand. You found DNA linked to the victim, but it wasn’t the victim’s?’

Eyre looked steadily at him.

‘Aoife had a child?’ Carla asked; it was the only thing that made sense.

‘We believe so. Aoife’s stomach was slit from side to side. The post-mortem showed she’d been pregnant, but there was no sign of the baby. We couldn’t prove the child’s gestation, so defence would have argued conjecture if we’d presented it, but the whole team felt it was relevant.’

‘But why was this not made public?’

‘It was. There were a few reports of it in the local news but we asked the media not to over emphasise it.’

‘Because if someone knew it had survived, they might go after it?’

‘Exactly. And why else slit a young girl’s stomach in two?’

‘And you’d be looking because that child would have been proof of the abuse?’ Bremer offered. Eyre lifted his left shoulder slightly, an attempt at a shrug.

‘That’s what we decided. Aoife showed signs of significant gestation, possibly up to eight months, so any baby delivered would have been hard to get rid of. And you can’t tell me, in all this time, it wouldn’t have been found by some dog walker or amateur archaeologist by now? So whoever took it, kept it alive – but why?’

‘Do you believe Mary had something to do with it?’