Michelle Harper wore an off-the-shoulder dove-grey top, revealing that she had recently topped up her fake tan. Her oval talons were painted in a dusty-pink colour, featuring nail art made from dozens of miniature diamanté gems, some of which had become detached. Her toenails matched, visible through open-toed boots. Rather than being shocked or upset at being swooped on by a tactical squad, she seemed annoyed. The offer of a solicitor had been disdainfully refused.

Rajavi pressed the taping device to on, and it made a loud bleep to show that it was recording. She made her introductory statement covering time and date and people present, then pushed her glossy mane away from her face and leaned forward as far as her pregnant belly would allow. ‘So, Michelle, you’re aware that the third bedroom at 57 Willow Way has been concealed behind a false partition.’

Michelle wrinkled her nose. ‘Of course. I put it there.’

‘But when your house was searched on the tenth of May this year, following your daughter’s disappearance, you didn’t think to mention it to the officers involved in the search?’

Michelle shrugged, unperturbed. ‘Why would I have done? It would just have wasted their time.’

‘What was the purpose of closing off the room like that?’ Rachel asked. ‘Most people want to add bedroom space, not lose it.’

‘I’ve only got one kid, I don’t need a third bedroom. It makes much more sense to use it for storage. There’s only a tiny loft and it’s impossible to get in and out of. I’m going to turn that room into a walk-in wardrobe eventually. Well, I was going to. Before…’

She looked down at her lap.

‘A walk-in wardrobe with a false front?’ persisted Rachel.

‘I wanted it to be like one I saw on Cribs on MTV,’ said Michelle earnestly. ‘This rapper had it in his house in Hollywood, which cost like twenty million dollars. There was a wall of shelves and you pressed a button and it swung open to this huge wardrobe. That’s what I was basing it on.’

Leila Rajavi seemed at a loss. The room was indeed being used for storage, just as Michelle said. And Michelle was the sort of person who would see a rapper’s home as aspirational, even though replicating the arrangement in her modest house was bizarre.

‘We’ll need to have a look at your laptop.’

Michelle’s mouth twitched as if she was suppressing a smile. No longer annoyed, she was enjoying herself. ‘Knock yourselves out.’

‘Excuse me?’ Rajavi glared.

‘I don’t have one. I. Do. Not. Own. A. Laptop.’

‘What about a tablet?’

Michelle shook her head. ‘I bought one for Lola, for her to watch cartoons and stuff.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘Still in her bedroom, as far as I know. I just use my phone if I want to look up stuff online.’

‘We’ll need your phone then,’ Rajavi told her.

Michelle’s eyes widened. ‘You’re kidding.’

Rajavi smiled. ‘Obviously not.’

‘But I’ll get it back?’

‘It depends what we find.’

---

Back in Tinworth Street, Rachel could barely tolerate sitting at her desk, thanks to the combination of Brickall’s absence and the morning’s frustrating dead end.

Michelle Harper had been released without charge, pending further investigation, and DS Rajavi had promised to update Rachel about the forensics on the ‘walk-in wardrobe’ and the examination of Michelle’s phone. After answering a handful of emails and deleting about fifty more without reading them, Rachel abandoned her paperwork and went to find Nigel Patten.

‘Sir, I—’

He held up his hand to forestall her speech.

‘If you’re here to tell me that Giles Denton’s calling an emergency meeting at CEOP regarding Chloe Atwell, I already know.’

‘I wasn’t, actually.’ Rachel thought back over the past fifteen minutes, realising that in her distracted state she had probably just deleted an email about the meeting by mistake. ‘I wanted to talk to you about DS Brickall.’

‘Go on,’ said Patten warily.

‘I’ve spoken with the barrister who reported him, and she’s agreed to retract her complaint. There was a degree of misunderstanding involved, and she doesn’t want to proceed with it now she has all the facts.’

Patten sighed. ‘DI Prince, you know full well that once it’s been passed on to the PCC, it’s out of our hands. They’re duty-bound to investigate anyway.’

‘So you can’t stop it?’

He shook his head, but his tone softened. ‘I’m afraid not. Listen, Rachel: I do know how much you value DS Brickall, and therefore how difficult this is for you. If I can pass on a formal statement of retraction by…’

‘She’s called Amber Crowley.

‘… Ms Crowley, it’s certainly going to be in Brickall’s favour when the case against him is weighed up. So you weren’t wasting your time by speaking to her.’

Rachel smiled weakly. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I’ll tell you what: the meeting at CEOP’s not until five and you look worn out from covering both your job and Mark’s… Why don’t you take a couple of hours off? Go and do some Christmas shopping.’

---

The streets of the West End were a riot of jewel-coloured globes, miniature Christmas trees, ice-white snowflakes and gold shooting stars with shimmering tails. Rachel wandered up Bond Street and down Regent Street, staring at the inviting shop windows, which sparkled with yet more lights and heaps of improbably fancy wrapped gifts. Gifts which were almost certainly empty boxes beneath their metallic gold paper and gauze ribbons.

This summed up Christmas for Rachel: a glittery mirage with very little at its heart. She was not religious or even remotely spiritual, and although she enjoyed living in a comfortable flat, its functional interior was testament to her disdain for material possessions. That was all Christmas was about, she thought, as she watched shoppers hurrying past with handfuls of bulging carrier bags: stuff. Just more and more stuff. Stuff no one really needed.

She tried to remember the last time she had been Christmas shopping. Not in years. Usually she ordered a handful of presents from the comfort of her laptop and stayed away from the shops completely. This afternoon she found herself in an upmarket department store and, seduced by the feeling of entering Aladdin’s cave, buying gifts. A pashmina for her mother, a book about military history for her brother-in-law, and a bottle of expensive gin for her sister, who, when pressed, would admit to enjoying a G&T as though it were smoking a crack pipe. Her niece and nephew would receive cash. She had no idea of their tastes, but they were old enough to appreciate having spending power of their own.

Finally, in a fit of uncharacteristic sentimentality, she bought a burgundy cashmere scarf for Brickall, to wear with the Crombie overcoat that she teased made him look like a second-hand car salesman.

She was paying for her purchases when her mobile rang. It was Leila Rajavi.

‘Hold on,’ said Rachel through the deafening hubbub of canned Christmas music and chattering shoppers. ‘Let me call you back in a second when I can actually hear you.’

She went to the top-floor restaurant, ordered a pot of tea and sat down at a window table to return the call.

‘The bloody mobile’s clean!’ Rajavi didn’t even try to hide her frustration. ‘The only interesting thing we found was frequent calls to a contact saved as ‘Sunny’, a number that turned out to be a burner when we traced it.’

‘Can you triangulate its location?’

‘We’re working on that. Forensics wasn’t quite a total blank. There were minute traces of Lola’s DNA on the carpet in the blocked-off room: saliva and spots of blood.’

‘Blood? Not what you would expect, surely?’

‘Maybe. But given that the child lived in the house and could have gone into the room frequently to play, it’s not definitive. There wasn’t enough of it to suggest foul play. And Lola’s iPad was in her room, just like Michelle said: nothing on there but cartoons and kids’ stuff. So now DCI Manners wants me to organise someone to go out to Belgium.’

‘I have a feeling that could end up being me,’ observed Rachel drily. ‘Whoopee.’

‘Well it can’t be me, obviously, given that I’m about to pop… Other than that, I’m not sure what our next move is.’

‘Ben Wethers?’

‘Still too traumatised, according to family liaison and the social worker. But the relevant people are on standby, and we’re hopeful we might be able to try tomorrow. I’m about to go over all the CCTV from the night Carly died.’

‘Baby steps,’ Rachel told her firmly. ‘The pieces of the puzzle will come together. We just need that first solid connection, then everything else will fall into place. I’m just heading to a meeting with Child Protection, but I’ll get back to you with an update afterwards.’

---

‘Mince pies.’

Giles Denton put a plate of them at the centre of the meeting room table, as though offering up a sacrifice. ‘To thank you all for coming at such short notice,’

His dark eyes twinkled in Rachel’s direction, and hers alone. Brickall would have a field day with this if he were here, she thought. Evidence for his Denton romance conspiracy theory.

‘Okay, let’s get to it: I’m going to keep this brief. Belgian police have arrested two men in relation to the murder of Chloe Atwell. They’re Romanian nationals…’ He pulled up two scowling mug shots on the wall-mounted screen: one huge, hulking and blank-eyed, the other smaller, with a sneering expression. ‘Gavril Vasile and Danut Petrescu. Intelligence have confirmed that they’re both known members of a human trafficking organisation. It’s not yet clear what they had planned for Chloe after they snatched her, but it appears that something went wrong in transit and she ended up dead before reaching her final destination…’

He paused and looked at the other five people round the table. Rachel recognised all of them but one, whom Denton had introduced as the CID liaison from Sussex Police.

‘Obviously one of the first things we needed to establish was a possible link to the case of Lola Jade Harper. Both men deny having any involvement in her disappearance, and the alibis they’ve provided appear to support their claim that they were both in Romania on the ninth of May. Until we’ve had the chance to double-check this, I suggest we don’t mention Lola Jade in any press statement we put out. Depending on what we find, we may have to get someone from that enquiry out to Belgium to question them.’

‘The press will speculate anyway,’ said Nick Furnish, biting into his second mince pie.

‘Of course: that’s the nature of the beast,’ agreed Patten.‘And up to a point, that’s their job.’

‘So if the alibis are confirmed and we can officially rule these men out of Lola Jade’s abduction, we will need to reassure the public that efforts to find her are still ongoing,’ said Gilly Durante. ‘Can we confirm that’s the case?’

Nigel Patten gave a little nod in Rachel’s direction.

‘Yes,’ said Rachel, ‘absolutely. I’m still working closely with Surrey Police on a couple of leads.’

At that moment her phone buzzed with a text from Leila Rajavi.

I think we’ve got something.