A couple of hours later, Rachel was back on Victoria Embankment.

This time, she was not visiting the offices of Hepburn, Willis & Bell, but 6 Bailey Court, a barristers’ chambers. There on the brass plate at the entrance listing the incumbent lawyers was an engraving that read Miss Amber Crowley.

The clerk at the front desk was unmoved by Rachel’s warrant card: police officers routinely attended criminal-case conferences in chambers. Miss Crowley was in court, but would be back when the morning session ended, at 1 p.m. It was now 12.45, so Rachel decided to wait.

She recognised Amber as soon as she walked into the building. Brickall’s description had been minimal, but this girl was a real head-turner, with olive skin, glossy dark brown hair that fell in waves almost to her waist, a figure that wouldn’t disgrace a catwalk, and arresting chartreuse-green eyes. Small wonder Brickall had been so obsessed with her that he had risked his job.

‘Ms Prince.’ She extended a hand in a perfunctory handshake when the receptionist told her Rachel was waiting to see her. She smiled, but there was a hint of irritation that her lunch break was being interrupted.

‘Detective Inspector Prince.’ Rachel returned the smile. ‘Could I have a quick word?’

Amber led her into her room, shared with a colleague. It had antique keyhole desks piled high with pink-ribboned briefs and the paraphernalia of court dress: wig tins and starched white neckbands. Bookshelves of legal texts lined the walls.

‘Sit down,’ said Amber, pointing to her colleague’s empty chair. She sat opposite Rachel and started puffing on an electronic cigarette. ‘How may I help you? Is this concerning evidence in a criminal case?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘Mark Brickall is my DS.’

‘Ah.’ Amber pursed her lips round her e-cigarette and blew vapour at the ceiling.

‘I understand you made a complaint about him?’

‘Damn right I did,’ Amber replied coolly. ‘What he did constituted harassment. Coming to my address – which I assume he found on the vehicle registration database – and then lifting my personal number from the case file and using it to message me. Following me around. It’s totally unprofessional and unacceptable.’

‘I agree,’ said Rachel. ‘And I told him so myself, believe me. But that last time you saw him: that was a genuine coincidence. He was going to leave you alone, and he had no idea you’d be at the same event. It wasn’t deliberate. I can vouch for that.’

‘I see.’ More scented vapour floated to the ceiling.

‘I may as well get to the point: I’m here to ask you to retract your complaint. His style may be a bit brash, but Mark’s a bloody good police officer, and a great colleague. Someone I trust implicitly and can rely on completely. It would be a great shame, and a loss to the force, if he was fired from his job because of an idiotic mistake. He thought you and he had chemistry, and he acted on it. It was a bad judgement call, but there was nothing sinister behind it, just overconfidence.’

Amber gave Rachel a long look. ‘Are you and he an item?’

‘Good God, no!’

‘Just the way you speak about him… So what is your relationship?’

‘Friends,’ Rachel said firmly. ‘Good friends. We’ve worked together on and off for years. He’s a good guy; really he is.’

Amber raised her hands to indicate defeat. ‘All right, you win.’ She gave a reluctant smile. ‘That mitigation was worthy of a top QC. I’ll contact your boss – Patten, is it? – and tell him I don’t wish to complain. Hopefully my point will have been made.’

‘Oh it has,’ said Rachel, standing up. ‘You can be sure about that.’

---

‘What I want,’ Rachel told Brickall over the phone, as she walked back to Tinworth Street, ‘is for you and me to go round to Willow Way and have a look ourselves.’

‘We can’t, you muppet,’ Brickall scoffed. ‘Since Michelle’s not been charged with any crime, you need a warrant to search her house. And I can’t go with you because – in case it’s somehow slipped your mind – I’ve been suspended.’

‘About that…’

Rachel told Brickall that she’d successfully persuaded Amber Crowley to have a change of heart. He swore copiously, blustering that she had no right to interfere in his problems. Once he’d calmed down, he did concede that he was grateful.

‘Patten didn’t want to know, when I tried him,’ Rachel said. ‘I thought going direct to Amber was the only option I had. And by the way: you’re right. She is stunning.’

Brickall ignored this. ‘Speaking of Patten, are you going to tell him you want a warrant to search 57 Willow Way again? I guess you could use the Chloe disappearance as a reason to re-examine the scene.’

‘No,’ Rachel said firmly. She had arrived at the NCA building and was now walking up to the third floor rather than taking the lift, to see how her right knee stood up to the climb. To her delight, it was fine. ‘You know how Patten works: he’ll start faffing about getting Ops involved again. I thought I’d go straight through Surrey Police. It’s on their patch after all, and they’ve probably got a tame magistrate on hand to sign off a warrant. I’ll phone them the second I’m back at my desk…’

She walked into the office as she spoke, glaring at the empty chair where Brickall should have been sitting at that moment.

‘… which is now. Better go.’

‘Hold on,’ said Brickall quickly. ‘While we’re on the subject of phone calls, are you still being stalked?’

Rachel thought about this for a second. ‘Actually, now you mention it, the calls seem to have stopped. I spoke to the phone company – maybe that did the trick.’

She logged onto her computer, checked her emails, and was about to contact Leila Rajavi when a text arrived from Brickall.

Think you should check news headlines.

At exactly the same time, she saw a flagged email from Giles Denton, an earlier missed call from him on her mobile and a Post-it note on her screen from Margaret, asking her to phone Giles. Laying her phone down again, she went to the BBC news site.

Body of missing girl found

The body of missing eight-year-old Chloe Atwell has been found at the edge of a field near the village of Terrest in Belgium. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Chloe was snatched from a children’s play area in a park in Chilbourne, Sussex, four days ago. Officers from Sussex Police are on their way to Belgium now, and are known to be investigating links between Chloe Atwell and the disappearance of six-year-old Lola Jade Harper from nearby Eastwell seven months ago.

There was a link to a video of the Chief Constable of Sussex Police breaking the news.

Rachel buried her face in her hands for a few seconds, then phoned DS Rajavi’s number. Predictably, her line was engaged.

---

‘Bad day at the office?’

Howard intercepted Rachel as she headed into the gym building. The place was now decked with tinsel and paper chains, and there were carols playing. There were only a couple more working weeks until Christmas – and the obligatory tense family lunch with her sister and brother-in-law.

‘You could say that.’ Rachel smiled wearily. She had fielded at least half a dozen media enquiries asking if the search for Lola Jade was about to move to Belgium, denying it while simultaneously knowing that this was a real possibility, and that it would be she who would be tasked with leading the operation. ‘I think I’m going to skip the boxing and have a swim instead. It’ll make me more zen.’

Howard put out a hand and stopped her in her tracks as she headed for the ladies’ changing room.

‘Hold on a minute, can we have a quick chat?’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No, not really. Won’t take long.’

‘Okay.’ Sighing, Rachel trudged after him to the café, thinking longingly of the warm, blue water of the pool.

‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ he said when they had sat down. ‘I know who’s been making those unwanted calls to your mobile.’

She stared at him. ‘You do? How?’

He looked down at his hands. ‘Because it was Julie.’

‘Your wife? Are you sure?’

Howard nodded. ‘I opened a letter to her from her phone company, and it said that they had been tracing some calls that had been made from her number. So I checked on her mobile and found a whole load of withheld calls to your number. She must have lifted it from my phone without me noticing.’

‘But why?’ Rachel tried to engage eye contact. ‘That stuff about women here chucking themselves at you… is that what she thought I was doing?’

He grinned. ‘I seem to remember that’s actually what you did.’

‘Only after she put the idea in my head.’ Rachel was also smiling. ‘What happened was her fault.’

‘She’d heard me mention teaching you to box, and that night you apologised to me in the pub, she saw us talking and was able to put a face to the name. Then she found out we were doing PT sessions together… and that night at the cocktail bar, first you left, and then I went out of phone contact for a while.’

‘She’d make a good detective.’ Rachel smiled ruefully. ‘And I’m happy to report that the calls have stopped.’

‘I think that letter gave her a fright. Shocked her out of her stupid behaviour.’

‘And our sleeping together… you could say it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

‘She still doesn’t know we actually did it. She just suspects. And frankly, that’s the least of our problems at the moment.’

‘Will you confess?’

He shook his head. ‘If we do stay together, it will just create friction. Although that’s looking more and more unlikely.’

‘Oh God.’ Rachel sighed loudly.

‘Don’t feel bad: none of this is your fault. The irony is that Julie hasn’t always respected our marriage vows herself. She’s had… close friendships with people she’s worked with.’

He let this revelation hang, but Rachel was too stressed for a discussion of someone else’s marital shortcomings, and could think only of the soothing swimming pool water surging over her body. She stood up.

‘Sorry to hear that. But it’s best we just forget it. For now, anyway.’

She couldn’t resist turning as she walked away. Howard was giving her retreating back a long, wistful look.

---

The following morning, early, she was back in Eastwell, standing outside 57 Willow Way with DS Rajavi and a group of uniformed policemen in stab vests.

At 10 p.m. the night before, she had finally got hold of Rajavi, who had filed an urgent request for a search warrant. The house was still empty, and the tactical squad felt like overkill, but Rachel was tense nonetheless. More than anything she wished that Brickall could be with her. Tactical operations were where he came into his own, never panicking or losing his cool.

The door was forced open and the rooms swept for either humans or weaponry. Then Rachel led Rajavi upstairs to the landing.

‘Here,’ she said, opening the door next to the bathroom, surrounded by the blaze of distracting purple poppies. She banged on the partition at the back of the cupboard. It made a hollow sound.

‘Shall I get an Enforcer?’

‘No, wait…’ Rachel pressed her fingers against the back of the cupboard, which was about a foot deep. ‘Let me just test my theory first.’

She cleared the shelves of their tangle of shoes, toilet rolls, cleaning materials and spare light bulbs, then grasped the edge of one of the shelves and pulled. The whole of the back panel, shelves and all, lifted away in one piece, like the separation between layers in a box of chocolates. It was heavy, and Rachel staggered a little. Rajavi beckoned for the armed officers to come up the stairs, and they all crowded onto the narrow landing to see what had been concealed behind the partition.

It was a small room, empty apart from a few plastic crates stacked against the walls.

Rajavi gave her a look, and Rachel knew only too well the mixed emotions it conveyed. A strange blend of disappointment that Lola Jade was not there, and relief that her remains were not there either.

With the false front removed, the room was about six feet wide and nine feet deep. It smelt stuffy and stale, but other than a few dead flies on the windowsill, there was no sign of recent habitation. Rachel put on two pairs of latex gloves and opened the top crate on the pile. It contained baby clothes, most in sickly shades of pink. The box below that held clothes for a toddler, and the ones below that some outgrown school uniform: grey pinafores, white blouses, blue cardigans. She knelt down and took a closer look at the beige carpet, but at first glance it seemed clean. In fact, there were track marks in the pile where a hoover had been used.

‘Get a forensics unit down here,’ Rajavi told one of the uniformed officers. ‘And someone go and bring in Mrs Harper, either from Jubilee Terrace or the Happy Nails salon.’ She turned to Rachel again. ‘Do you think this has something to do with Lola Jade, DI Prince?’

‘Right now, I honestly have no idea. But I’m hoping her mother will be able to tell us.’