“No. I can’t remember. And I mean I really can’t remember. I don’t even remember if I ever knew.”

Gerry paused. She didn’t want to give away too much information but felt that if she gave a little she might get more out of Jade. “As far as we can gather,” she said, “Mimsy was alive when they threw her out of the van on Bradham Lane. Now, maybe it’s as you say and she started acting up, causing trouble when they wanted to do something she didn’t like, and they got angry with her and chucked her out naked on the roadside. But she was still alive after that. She walked back up the road. Not very far, but she walked for about ten or fifteen minutes. She was hurt, but she was alive. Then someone else came from the same direction and . . . Well, that was where we found her body. Not where they chucked her out of the van, but where the second vehicle stopped. Who do you think was in that vehicle, Jade?”

“I don’t know!” said Jade. “It could’ve been Sunny, I suppose, if she’d told him she was leaving. Or one of the others. Faisal. Hassan. Ismail. One of the young lads, even. I mean, Ismail’s got all those minicabs. Maybe Sunny told the cousins just to kick her out of the van on a quiet lane when they’d done with her.”

That was a point, Gerry realized. The minicabs. Go over the CCTV footage again—limited as it was to major roads some distance from Bradham Lane—and see if one of Ismail’s minicabs had been cruising there at the right time. They hadn’t spotted one yet, but it was worth another look. “But why?” she asked. “Why kill Mimsy? After all, Sunny was the one who sent her in the van to start with.” Which also meant, Gerry realized, that Sunny knew where she was, who she was with and where she was going.

“If they thought she was going to talk, maybe,” Jade said. “Like I said, she’d been bitchy a lot lately, mouthy, rebellious, talking back, like she didn’t have to do what they said and they should give her a bit more respect. Sunny didn’t like that. He was always clocking her one.”

“But you said they didn’t care if you talked, that they thought nobody would believe you, that the police or the social would just think you asked for it.”

“They cared if we talked because it would put an end to what they had going. That’s all. They weren’t worried about getting arrested or going to jail or anything. They told us all that just so we’d know it wouldn’t do us any good. But it would do them some harm. Spoil their nice little party. And it has.”

“Did the police know what was going on? Do you think they helped Sunny and the others, or turned a blind eye?”