‘So who is he?’

Brickall hit the horn of the pool car hard as he negotiated one of London’s overused A roads, attempting to head south. It was morning rush hour, and the lanes were snarled with buses, vans, bikes and jaywalking pedestrian commuters.

Rachel, right leg propped awkwardly in the angle of the seat well, pretended she hadn’t heard him. Instead she reached into her bag and pulled out a blister pack of tramadol, swallowing a couple with the cooling takeout coffee in the cup holder.

Brickall persisted. ‘Whoever phoned you at the party – who is he? Or she. I mean, your face! You went white as a sheet.’

‘No one.’

‘Must be someone if you were that freaked out.’

Rachel gave a wry smile. ‘What are you – a detective?’

He cruised to a stop at another of the interminable traffic lights and turned to face her. ‘So?’

She kept her head turned away. ‘Just an ex, that’s all.’

Brickall raised his eyebrows slightly, but before he could ask any more questions, Rachel had inserted her headphones and closed her eyes.

---

Willow Way was one of a handful of roads on a private estate to the south-west of the dormitory suburb of Eastwell. They were all named after trees – Birch Close, Ash Crescent, Sycamore Drive – and when construction had taken place in the early nineties an abundance of trees had been planted to reinforce the point. The buildings now looked dated, but the trees had matured to give an air of suburban comfort. They were modest houses in linked pairs and small terraces – blocks of three or four homes aimed at young families and junior executives. Tidy, but not aspirational. Brickall parked outside number 57, and they both took in the property before getting out of the car. The front garden was laid to lawn, and it looked as though it could do with the attentions of a mower. Most of the neighbours had added hanging baskets and large pot plants; Michelle had none. There were no children’s bicycles and toys as there were in front of the other houses. But the house seemed well maintained, and the windows were clean. They walked up the path and rang the bell.

Silence. No dog barking, no footsteps, no sound of a radio or television. Rachel rang again, then peered through the window into the open-plan living and dining room. No signs of life, no lights on. In the kitchen, which she could just glimpse through the arch at the back of the room, the countertops were clear of any of the detritus of daily life.

‘What d’you reckon?’ asked Brickall.

‘Looks like she’s gone away. Given what’s happened, I can’t really blame her.’

‘Would’ve been nice to know that before sitting in traffic for over an hour…’ Brickall vaulted over the side gate and disappeared towards the back of the house, re-emerging a couple of minutes later shaking his head. ‘Nada. Not a fucking sausage.’

‘Good job I brought the file with me, then. Her number will be on the contact sheet: I’ll phone her.’

As soon as the call was picked up, she recognised the defensive tone from the emergency call.

‘Who is this?’

‘Michelle, this is DI Prince, from Investigation Support at the National Crime Agency in London. I’m at your address, hoping to have a quick word. Are you around?’

There was a brief pause.

‘I’m out shopping.’

‘When will you be back?’

‘No idea. An hour maybe?’

After telling Michelle that they would wait, Rachel and Brickall parked at the nearest parade of shops and found a café. Brickall ordered his usual: a full English with the works. Rachel took the file out of her bag and continued reading it.

‘Just double-checking for more info on the father,’ she told Brickall as he dipped a sausage into egg yolk. ‘Want to get the facts before we ask Michelle about him.’

Gavin Harper had been named as a person of interest at the start of the enquiry into Lola Jade’s disappearance. After her phone call to Leila, Rachel had checked the PNC nominals file, and sure enough, earlier that year he had been cautioned for violating a court order relating to shared custody, following an allegation made by Michelle Harper.

‘He’s got to be the most likely culprit,’ she told Brickall. ‘Gavin Harper. He tried to snatch her before, apparently.’

‘Divorced dad syndrome,’ Brickall observed through his mouthful of fried food. ‘Using the kid to get at the ex. It’s classic stuff.’

Other than that, there were just a few traffic offences and a very minor Public Order Offence when Gavin Harper was a teenager. According to the file, a blue notice had been issued on Interpol’s database, requesting any information about his whereabouts, along with the statutory yellow notice aimed at locating missing minors. If he had left the country after the notice had been issued, then his name would automatically have been flagged up at border crossings, airports and anywhere else where passports would have been checked. The notices had been issued on the morning of 20 October after local officers had attempted to re-interview Gavin Harper and been unable to find him. If he had been travelling with his daughter, the chances of no one spotting them and reporting it were virtually zero. Not now that Lola’s face had been on the front page of the papers for months.

Among the raft of paper statements was an alleged sighting of Lola Jade in Brussels, and another in Portugal, both around a week after her disappearance. Officers from the Surrey force had flown to Belgium and to the Algarve to investigate these claims, but had drawn a blank. A few more such sightings were reported in the weeks that followed, but it had been decided that they would only be actively pursued if substantial evidence came to light. It did not.

Local sightings had also failed to throw up any concrete leads. Sniffer dogs and divers in the local quarries and reservoirs had drawn a blank. After twenty days with no sightings of the child, a cadaver dog had been through Lola Jade’s home, but found no evidence that she had died there. Inevitably, as weeks had turned into months, Lola was demoted from front-page headlines to the inside pages as the fickle public started to move on.

---

When Brickall had finished his breakfast and they had both drunk their coffee, they returned to Willow Way. This time, there was a white BMW hatchback parked outside the house. The front door opened after the first ring. When Brickall held up his warrant card, the woman pulled the door fully open and stepped aside, indicating that they should come in. They followed her into the living room.

Michelle Harper wore tight white jeans and a T-shirt with a designer logo. Her toenails and fingernails were immaculately painted, and her hair – no longer blonde but a nut brown – looked as though it had recently been professionally blow-dried. She did not offer tea or coffee, but indicated that the two of them should sit on the armchairs that matched the cream sofa. The room was tidy to the point of sterility, and although photos of Lola Jade still graced the wall, there were few other reminders of her in the room.

‘I’m DI Rachel Prince, and this is DS Mark Brickall. As I told you over the phone, we’re from the National Crime Agency. We—’

‘National?’ Michelle interrupted, ‘So you’re nothing to do with Surrey Police?’

‘No. I’m… we’re part of the investigation support team reviewing your daughter’s case.’

‘So Surrey Police aren’t bothering with Lola any more?’ Michelle blinked hard, reached for a tissue and gave her eyes a quick wipe. ‘Sorry, can’t help getting emotional when I talk about her.’ She pulled a packet of cigarettes from her bag, lit one and then cast around for an ashtray. Unable to find one, she took the plastic saucer from under a fake orchid and used that to collect the accumulating ash. ‘They’ve given up on her: I knew it.’

‘It’s not that they’re not bothering. It doesn’t work like that,’ Brickall explained. ‘They’ll pass on any new leads, of course, and we’ll liaise with them in return. But they haven’t got officers out there looking for her at the moment, no.’

Michelle’s face wore an unreadable expression. ‘They reckon she’s dead. It’s obvious. And I keep telling them: how can she be when it’s Gavin that’s done this. He’s organised it somehow. I don’t know how, but he’s done it. It would be absolutely typical of him.’

Rachel attempted what she hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘Nobody’s suggesting Lola Jade’s dead; we’re very much working around the possibility of finding her alive. We wouldn’t be getting involved if that possibility didn’t exist. And obviously we will be looking very closely at your ex-husband.’

Michelle nodded, and even managed a brief smile, as she pushed out a stream of smoke through collagen-plumped lips.

‘That’s all well and good but – no offence – Surrey Police have been telling me the same thing, and five months down the line we’re no closer.’

Brickall leaned to one side to avoid the plume of smoke. ‘What makes you so sure it was your ex-husband?’

‘Because she didn’t cry out. If she’d woken up and there was a stranger in her room, she’d have screamed the place down. She made a racket even if she had a bad dream. But there was nothing. Whoever took her, she went with them willingly. So it has to be Gavin. Who else?’ She flicked a tube of ash from her cigarette. ‘And by the way: he’s not my ex, we’re still married. That’s the point: he was afraid of losing custody of Lola Jade in the divorce.’

‘Can you think of anyone else who might know where Gavin’s gone?’

Michelle pursed her lips. ‘Well, his family – his dad and his brother – they say they don’t know, but…’

She let this hang for a while, then stubbed out her cigarette and pressed her hand to her forehead. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to go. I’m getting a migraine. Talking about Lola Jade brings them on: it’s the stress.’

Rachel started to speak, but Michelle buried her face in her hands, drooping like a flower. ‘Sorry: I can’t. I just can’t.’

‘Talk to the hand!’ sniggered Brickall as they headed back down the drive. ‘Bloody Nora, she’s a fragile little thing, our Michelle, isn’t she?’

‘Hardly,’ scoffed Rachel. ‘But there’s no point badgering her at this point: we need to try and find Gavin Harper. Who sounds a right piece of work.’

‘So: you’re up to speed on the file,’ said Brickall as he swung out of the housing estate and rejoined the London Road. ‘D’you think he did it?’

‘I’m going to go back and reread his statement, that’s for sure.’ Rachel’s tone was careful, but Brickall knew she was forming a hunch. ‘Think about it: he’s the one with a motive for taking Lola. Plus, he previously violated a custody agreement, in effect abducting his own child, however briefly.’

‘But?’ Brickall persisted.

‘If he managed to take her out of the country with him when he left, then where has she been since May? And would they not have been spotted, given her face has been on the front page of every paper?’

‘He could have managed it if he snatched her and handed her straight over to someone else before Michelle raised the alarm. Someone who took her abroad for him and kept her hidden there until he could join her. Or what if Gavin Harper’s taken her but hasn’t gone abroad? They could be hiding somewhere in this country.’

‘Assuming she’s alive,’ pointed out Rachel. ‘But you know the statistics. Ninety per cent of missing kids are found within seventy-two hours. Of the remaining ten per cent, the vast majority turn up within three weeks, most of them in body bags.’

‘Either way, we’ll need to speak to Michelle again at some point,’ said Brickall firmly. ‘We were only just getting warmed up.’

‘Agreed.’ Rachel nodded. ‘We’re definitely not done with the lovely Michelle.’