‘I’m in computer programming, you see,’ said Philip Lewis. ‘So it was relatively simple for me to create this system.’

Looking at him, Rachel could quite easily believe it. She had expected the son of Mr and Mrs Tiggywinkle to be similarly short and rotund, but he was all bony angles, with a shaved head and Thunderbirds glasses. She had arranged to meet him in Willow Way and his parents were waiting anxiously on the patio in the garden, as if afraid to come into their own house. Their son spoke to them in a hectoring, even bullying tone, which probably explained this.

Philip led Rachel up to the smallest of the spare rooms, no bigger than a box room, which housed a child-sized single bed and a small desk with a computer monitor and an upright hard drive underneath it. He showed her the active monitoring pictures in real time, then found the relevant file in a folder on the computer’s desktop.

‘There was a spate of break-ins at the beginning of the year, and my parents were understandably worried about it. I told them they should sell the house and move nearer to Sally and me in Morden, but they wouldn’t countenance it.’ He didn’t attempt to hide his disapproval of this decision. ‘So I set up this security system.’

‘And I’m very grateful for your expertise,’ said Rachel smoothly. She’d been accused of acting cool and over-analytical in the past, but let it never be said she didn’t know how to schmooze a witness.

‘Yes, well…’ He cleared his throat. ‘My youngest is around the same age as the little girl, and you can only imagine… so, obviously, anything I can do to help find her.’

He clicked on the file labelled 9/5/17_backup and pressed play.

The night images were black and white, but very clear, and Philip explained at tedious and self-important length why this was the case, with a lecture on image resolution and pixels. The lens of the camera picked up the shared driveway between numbers 57 and 55 and the shot also covered the front door of the Harpers’ house, the pathway that led to the side gate and garden, and a section of the road in front. In short, anyone entering or leaving the house would have been picked up by the Lewises’ camera.

Philip fast-forwarded through all the footage for that night, but there was no activity bar an urban fox rooting around the bins.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ he observed with evident smugness. ‘Mrs Harper claims someone must have come into the house via the patio door, but that’s not possible, given the only access to the gardens of number 57 and 55 is through the houses themselves.’

‘Hmm.’ Rachel was non-committal. An intruder could potentially have climbed over the top of the garage block and jumped down into the garden. It was doable, by someone fit. To return the same way carrying a young child would be a lot harder, though; impossible for a single intruder. If indeed Lola had been stolen to order, there had to have been more than one person involved.

The next day’s footage, in colour, showed the arrival of a police squad car at 7.12 a.m., then the comings and goings of Michelle’s family. This pattern continued for the next few days, with Michelle only leaving the house, accompanied by Clive Manners, to attend the press conference. Then on 18 May, at 13.11 p.m., Michelle left on her own, wheeling two huge matching purple suitcases – the type with rigid polycarbonate sides – and loading them into the boot of her white car. 18 May. The day after she had withdrawn £30,000 in cash from Lola’s fund.

Philip was observing Rachel’s reaction to this. ‘Do you need me to keep going?’ he asked. ‘I could, only it’s going to take me a while to go through five months’ worth of tape.’

Rachel, thinking of Marjorie and Norman hovering obediently in their garden, stood up. ‘No, that won’t be necessary, but obviously this constitutes evidence in the case, and as such, could be removed.’

Philip looked affronted.

‘Perhaps for now you could just send me copies of all the files.’

‘All of them?’

‘All of them, yes. From when you first installed the camera. I’m afraid that’s how this works.’

He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Of course, Detective Inspector. As I said, I’ll do anything I can to help.’

---

Rachel drove south for another twenty miles to HMP High Down, where Gavin Harper was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He walked slowly into the visiting room in prison-issue sweats, his face pale and unshaven.

‘I thought you’d got the message,’ he said belligerently. ‘I don’t sodding know where my daughter is.’

Rachel ignored this. ‘I’m about to head back to Albufeira,’ she told him pleasantly. ‘Thought I’d give you the chance to tell me where to look – save me wasting any more police time.’

He gave her a mulish look. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wasting police time: you going back out to Portugal to look for Lola Jade. I’ve told you: she’s not there. One hundred per cent. You’re not going to find her.’

Rachel was not about to tell him that she privately agreed with him, and that the return trip to Albufeira was Patten’s idea, not her own. ‘Okay, then… maybe you’d like to tell me how your seminal fluid ended up on the carpet in Lola Jade’s room?’

‘I never touched her. I’d never do anything like that. Michelle must have set me up.’

‘Set you up how?’

Gavin flushed slightly. ‘Look, I’m not proud of this, but even though we weren’t officially together any more, Michelle and I did still occasionally have sex. We always had a… fiery physical relationship. So I’d go round to see Lola or drop her off, we’d have a glass of wine and end up… you know…’

‘Screwing?’

His face reddened further. ‘Like I said, I’m not proud of it.’

Rachel leaned forward and placed her elbows on the table, getting into his space. ‘Even if you did, how the hell did your ejaculate end up in your daughter’s room?’

‘We’d use a condom and Michelle would deal with it after. I wouldn’t put it past her to tip it – the contents – onto Lola’s floor.’

‘And she’d do that because?’

‘I tried to tell you before: she wants people to blame me. That’s why I took off. She lied to some of her mates that I’d been touching Lola Jade, you know… in a sexual way. So this would be her twisted way of proving it. Now that I think about it, she was probably only up for a jump for that reason. She was always very quick to produce the rubber johnny.’ He rubbed his hand wearily over his forehead, as though he had been through this explanation countless times in his mind. ‘Like I said, it was because of all that that I panicked after they didn’t find Lola. It was stupid; I realise that now.’

‘And Michelle’s allegations that you were physically violent to her?’

His eyes widened. ‘Seriously? It was more the other way round. She was the one who would chuck things at me. Had a vicious temper on her.’

‘So how do you explain this?’

She opened the photos she had snapped from Michelle’s phone, of her bruised arms, and shoved her own phone across the table at him. He looked at the images, then something resembling a smile crept across his face.

‘The date they were taken. Didn’t you notice it?’

He pushed the phone back and Rachel looked. She’d snapped them hastily and the images were a bit blurred, but the date in the tag could just about be made out.

‘28 October 2016. I’d been in Albufeira about a week by then. And Michelle’s arms are a lot skinnier than that. These pictures aren’t even of her.’ He sneered. ‘I mean, what kind of a person does something like that just to discredit their kid’s dad. She’s not fit to be a mother.’

‘Is that why you were suing for custody?’

‘Bloody right it is. And I want you to ask her. Ask her why she’s made me out to be a child molester, and why she’s given you faked pictures.’

‘Oh, I intend to; don’t worry.’

‘And while you’re at it, ask Michelle what she did to Olly. Ask her what she did to our son.’