You see your own home through new eyes when someone visits it for the first time, Rachel thought.

Howard was at her flat for a personal training session. The consultant had not yet signed her off as fit, but the improvement in her knee was so great she wanted to try running again. The purpose of Howard’s home visits was, they both agreed, to make sure she didn’t undermine her progress so far.

Brickall had once categorised the decor as ‘axe-murderer chic’. The walls were plain off-white, the furnishings functional, the overall look completely impersonal. True, Brickall’s most recent visit had prompted her to order a few things online: a vibrant rug with green and magenta swirls on a cream background, and some framed pop art for the walls in the hallway. She had also brought back some colourful ceramic pots from Portugal and filled them with herbs. As a result, the overall result was less stark than it had been a few weeks ago. And with a concession to the approach of Christmas, she had put up some fairy lights, although she was not really a fairy-light sort of person.

‘This is nice,’ said Howard heartily when she let him in, though his face registered faint disappointment. ‘Convenient. The location, I mean.’

Rachel laughed. ‘It’s okay, I know it looks a bit like a corporate rental. But hey…’ she gestured round the room, ‘it’s now a corporate rental with fairy lights.’

Howard put her to work doing some basic stretches. She groaned at her lack of flexibility. ‘I haven’t had a chance to work out in weeks. I’ve been away on a job for most of November.’

‘I thought I hadn’t seen you in the gym for a while.’ He knelt down beside her and grappled her left leg into a hamstring stretch. They made eye contact and he stood up abruptly. ‘Right, let’s try some sumo squats: see how your knee handles it.’

‘I was in the Algarve,’ Rachel told him.

‘Fab – bit of winter sun. I thought you were looking tanned.’

‘It wasn’t fab at all, as it goes. It was a three-week exercise in frustration… But the less said about that, the better.’

After she had worked on stretching and warming up, Howard said, ‘How about we do a test run? Just a short one: see how you get on.’

‘What, now?’

He nodded. ‘Why not? It may be almost December, but at least it’s dry.’

‘And you’ll come with me?’

‘Of course. All part of the personal training package.’

Rachel put on a jacket and a woollen hat, and they headed out into the darkening streets, past sparkling street decorations and festive shop windows. They jogged gently along Jamaica Road and into Southwark Park, completing a circuit of the lake before Howard said she shouldn’t push her right leg too far, and insisted on her walking back. He came up to her flat with her, which struck her as strictly unnecessary.

‘I really need a hot shower,’ she told him, peeling off her jacket and hat. ‘So let’s pencil a couple more sessions in the diary now, then you can go.’

‘It’s okay, I can wait. I’m not in a rush.’

Rachel let her mind play out the sequence: her emerging fragrant and glowing from the shower, dressed in nothing but a towel, to find Howard waiting for her on the bed… Okay, stop, stop, stop! The image had degenerated into a scene from a generic seventies porn movie. She held up the calendar app on her phone. ‘No, let’s do it now, then you can get going.’ Their eyes met and she held his gaze just long enough to send him the message that she was tempted. Very tempted.

---

After she had showered and changed into clean sweats, Rachel phoned Brickall, eager to receive a debrief. For over a fortnight she and a handful of officers hand-picked from the Polícia Judiciária had combined forces with a specialist search team from Lisbon. This hastily assembled force had combed every back alley of every coastal resort, every waste tip and patch of scrubby ground, and questioned every local or tourist who had seen something suspicious or thought they had sighted Lola Jade. The press had inevitably got wind of their activity, and she had spent a lot of her time fending off a stream of calls from journalists. With no concrete news to report, the tabloids had jumped in anyway, with headlines along the lines of UK COPS IN RESORT SEARCH FOR LOLA JADE BODY.

On the couple of occasions she had flown back to London for the weekend, she had spent most of the time doing laundry and catching up on her sleep, and there had never been a chance to touch base properly with her sergeant.

His phone went to voicemail, but he phoned back half an hour later. ‘All right, tart?’

She crooked the phone against her shoulder while she poured herself a glass of red wine, then settled herself on the sofa. ‘I definitely drew the short straw, Detective Sergeant. Portugal’s lovely and everything, but weeks spent combing out-of-season resorts in the rain…’

‘I hear you.’

‘So where are Surrey Police with Lola Jade now? Give me an update before I get stuck in again.’

‘Good thing I checked up for you, eh? Seeing as I knew it would be the first bloody thing you asked me. They pulled the surveillance unit. After less than two weeks, apparently.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing: that’s the whole point. They had a unit sat outside Jubilee Terrace round the clock, watching Michelle and Lisa. Michelle came and went from the house, all perfectly above board. She works in a nail salon a few hours a week, but apart from going there and to the shops occasionally, there was nothing suspicious. Before the FSU was abandoned, they got another warrant and did another full search of the Urquharts’ house and Willow Way, but again: nothing. NCPA.’ He quoted the acronym for ‘No Cause for Police Action’. ‘So, the unit was stood down. I think CEOP followed up on a couple of leads, one in France and one in North Africa somewhere: one a kid who had actually been trafficked, but both negative for the Harper kid. Patten’s calling a combined team meeting soon, but I expect it will just be a formal wind-down.’

Rachel sighed heavily and pressed her hand to her forehead. ‘And – as I suspected would be the case – we found nothing at all in the Algarve. This could be the end of the road.’

‘Maybe. Or then again, maybe not.’

---

‘I can’t believe we’re doing this. Tell me we’re not doing this.’

‘We’re doing this.’

Rachel and Brickall were in his car, parked opposite Lisa Urquhart’s house. They both wore dark hats and gloves, and were equipped with sleeping bags and a Thermos of hot coffee. Every so often Brickall would fire up the engine as discreetly as he could, and briefly fill the car with a blast of hot air from the heater. Even so, it was very cold.

They had begun their stakeout at 8.30. There were lights on in the upstairs window, and children’s clamour punctuated by raised adult voices. Normal family stuff. A smell of fried food wafted from a part-open downstairs window, mingling with cigarette smoke. At 9 p.m., Kevin Urquhart returned from his shift as a baggage handler at Heathrow, parked his light blue VW Passat and went inside. There was more shouting, then the light from the upstairs room went off. Lisa emerged a few minutes later, bundled up in a fake-leopard-skin coat.

‘Shall we follow her?’ Brickall asked.

Rachel shook her head. ‘Nah, look – she’s in her slippers, and she’s only got a purse with her. She’ll be after fags or booze.’

Sure enough, Lisa shuffled to the corner shop at the end of Jubilee Terrace and returned a couple of minutes later with a packet of cigarettes and a six-pack of beer cans. There was no sign of Michelle Harper.

‘How are we going to stay awake?’ Brickall grumbled, as the digital clock ticked past midnight. ‘I can feel myself nodding off.’

‘We’re going to have to talk.’

‘As in have a conversation?’

‘Afraid so.’

‘Okay then…’ Brickall took a swig of coffee from the neck of the flask, even though Rachel had asked him to use the cup. ‘How’s your love life? Still making eyes at your hunky personal trainer?’

Rachel let this one go, pulling her fleece jacket up round her neck and rubbing her hands together. ‘I’ve got a party coming up. A “girls’ night”.’ She wagged her fingers in quote marks, simultaneously pulling a face.

‘Oh Christ, that sounds crap.’

‘I know.’

‘Anyway, Prince, do you actually have any female friends? I’ve never heard you mention any. Not one.’

‘Not many,’ Rachel admitted. ‘I was never a girly girl.’

She thought back to her younger self. She had been overweight, and bullied, which accounted for many things. Her preoccupation with health and fitness, for one. Her wariness of commitment. There was one female in particular whose persecution had made her swerve her own gender: Lorraine Grassmore. A girl who had pretended to be her friend and to sympathise with her weight struggle, but had really been laughing at her behind her back the whole time. Thinking about her now could still make Rachel inhale forcibly, and she did.

‘What?’ asked Brickall.

She wasn’t about to launch into a sob story about her miserable adolescence: not now, when she was tired and disorientated. ‘Let’s just say I was never part of the popular crowd at school and then, as you now know, I married very young, and my career took over. There’s never been time for the girly stuff.’

‘Because you’re always too busy with men stuff.’

She swatted at him with a gloved hand. ‘I’ve nothing against going out for a drink – you know that – but there’s something about a bunch of women en masse…’ She shuddered.

‘So you’re looking forward to it then?’

‘It’s going to be awful.’

The final light went out on the top floor, and the house lapsed into silence. A cat howled menacingly, followed by a volley of screeches as a fight broke out and a dustbin was knocked over. A dog barked persistently for a couple of minutes, then fell silent. A couple of pub-goers wove their way home down the middle of the street.

Brickall fished out a tube of Smarties and swallowed a handful, offering them to Rachel. ‘I need to tell you something.’

‘Go on.’

‘You know Amber Crowley.’

‘The hot lawyer?’

He nodded. There was a pause.

‘Go on.’ Rachel repeated, trying to recall a time when she had last seen Brickall looking this worried. It had been a while.

‘She did something that makes me think… that she suspects I made use of her personal information when I shouldn’t have done.’

Rachel stared at him. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, you know I found her number on file and texted her to try and get her to go out with me. And maybe I was a little…’

‘Pushy?’

He sighed. ‘It was just meant to be, you know… banter. But she sent me this.’

He held up his phone, showing her a text. There was no message; just a hyperlink. Rachel took the phone and clicked on it. It took her via a web browser to a site displaying legislative guidelines for crown prosecutors. Specifically, offences under Section 55 of the Data Protection Act, which police officers were prone to abuse through their privileged access to the public’s personal information.

‘Shit,’ said Rachel.

‘I know.’

‘Maybe it’s just…’ she struggled to find a positive, ‘as you said, just banter. Like a private joke.’

Brickall looked at her sideways. ‘You don’t really believe that.’

‘Not really, no. Maybe it’s just intended to be a warning to leave her alone.’

‘I suppose.’ He didn’t seem overly reassured.

‘Whatever happens, for Christ’s sake stay away from her from now on. Promise me.’

‘Promise.’ Brickall finished the Smarties then bundled up his scarf and used it as a pillow, leaning against the door. ‘Wake me up in a couple of hours, then it’ll be your turn to have a kip.’

Rachel let him sleep for three hours, staring out at the silent, frosty street. Worrying. Eventually, when she could not keep her eyelids apart any longer, she woke Brickall and lay curled up on the back seat.

When she woke again it was still dark, but the clock on the dashboard said 6.45. Brickall went off in search of somewhere to empty his bladder, and came back with two cups of tea.

‘Café round the corner’s open if you want to go for a slash.’

Lights went on in the Urquhart household at 7.45, and once again voices were raised in parent–child discord. An hour later, the next-door neighbour emerged with a gaggle of children who appeared to be in fancy dress, knocking on the Urquharts’ door. Lisa answered it in her pyjamas, and, after turning over her shoulder to screech at her offspring, ejected Chelsea and Connor into the street: one dressed as a princess, the other as a fireman. She handed them their lunchboxes and book bags, then lit a cigarette and slammed the door shut, leaving her children to walk to school with the neighbour’s brood. One fireman, two princesses, a superhero and a penguin.

‘Weird,’ observed Brickall. ‘Now I really know I’m sleep-deprived. I’m hallucinating fucking penguins.’

‘There must be something going on at their school: World Book Day, or dress as your favourite character for charity or something.’

Of Michelle Harper there was no sign. She eventually emerged just before 10, just as Rachel and Brickall were about to give up. She was dressed in a shiny black Puffa coat and high-heeled boots, and wore giant sunglasses like ants’ eyes. She strutted to her white BMW, parked further along the street, and climbed in.

‘Mark, quick!’

He started the engine, and as soon as Michelle reached the junction with the main road, executed a fiercely efficient three-point turn and followed her. Michelle headed in the direction of Willow Way, driving quickly and confidently. When she glanced in her rear-view mirror, Rachel dropped her head so that her face was not visible. Brickall hung back out of sight until the BMW was on the driveway of number 57 and Michelle had gone inside, then parked about twenty metres away. He cut the engine and they waited.

Rachel’s head was thumping, her knee was sore after fourteen hours in the car and she needed to pee again. So it was for personal rather than procedural reasons that she perked up when Michelle emerged from the house again after only thirty minutes. She was carrying a full black plastic refuse sack.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Brickall, reaching instinctively for his airwave set. ‘That better not be body parts.’

He went to use the radio, but Rachel checked him with her right arm. ‘Wait a sec.’

Michelle had gone back into the house, and a couple of minutes later came out again with a second bag. She dumped both of them next to the wheelie bin, then got into her car.

‘We split,’ Rachel ordered, climbing out of the vehicle. ‘You go after her, I’ll check out what she’s dumped and phone you if we need backup.’

Right on cue, Michelle sped past them. Brickall took off after her, and Rachel walked slowly towards the black sacks, snapping on her latex gloves.