At 6.15 the next morning, Rachel was out of bed and climbing into a sports bra, a vest and a pair of loose athletics shorts that she used for running in hot weather.

Howard was waiting for her at the gym, standing next to the pull-up bars.

‘Up you jump, Rachel,’ he said, nodding in their direction.

‘Howard, I can’t. I don’t have enough upper-body strength.’

‘Exactly why you need to work on it.’

Inhaling hard and holding her breath, Rachel bent her knees and mustered as much aerial projection as she could, but only succeeded in banging her wrist on the bar. Howard gripped her round the waist and lifted her up as though she weighed no more than a child. She hesitated, savouring the moment of weightlessness, then grabbed hold. He let go, and she dangled awkwardly.

‘All right, now pull! Pull hard!’

Rachel managed to hoist herself a couple of inches higher, but then lost her grip and fell, landing awkwardly at Howard’s feet and sending a painful shock through her damaged knee joint. She grimaced.

‘Come on: again! You need to keep trying.’

‘I want to box.’ She was aware that she sounded whiny.

‘Do this, then you can box. You need to work on your dead hang. Literally hang like a dead man. Person,’ he corrected himself. ‘If your lats and chest are tight, you’re going to damage your shoulders and spine when you’re boxing. Hang! Like you’re dead!’

Thirty sweaty minutes and ten pull-ups later, Howard allowed her to give the punch ball a good beating. She headed to work with aching arms and shoulders but a glow of satisfaction.

---

‘Your face is as red as a beetroot,’ observed Brickall. ‘Early-morning shag, was it?’

Rachel shot him a warning glance.

‘Okay! How did you get on with the lovely Michelle then?’

Rachel shook her head slowly. ‘Not sure. She’s definitely buying into the possibility that Gavin Harper’s disappearance and Lola’s are related. And I did find out that he’s very close to his brother, Andy, so I reckon we talk to him next.’

‘Wasn’t he interviewed?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘They almost certainly spoke to him informally, but there’s no MG11 on the file. See if you can track him down.’

Half an hour later, Brickall slapped his desk in frustration. ‘I’m getting fuck-all here. According to the electoral roll, the only Andy Harper in the Eastwell area is sixty-eight. So he can’t be Gavin Harper’s brother.’

‘Then we widen the search.’

Rachel scoured local newspaper reports and social media but drew a blank, apart from the Facebook account of a fourteen-year-old Andy Harper.

‘See!’ said Brickall triumphantly. ‘The man doesn’t exist.’

‘Perhaps he’s moved out of the area. Try the General Register Office.’

Brickall frowned. ‘That’s only going to provide a record of his birth, not where he lives now.’

‘Right now, it’s all we’ve got.’

After an hour and a half of trawling the General Register database, Brickall found a handful of Andrew Harpers born between 1970 and 1990, but none of the family details matched Gavin Harper’s. ‘Waste of bloody time,’ he grumbled, and went off to find lunch.

Rachel went back to the drawing board, searching online articles about the case. There was an interview, in one of the many hysterical Lola Jade pieces, with Gavin Harper’s father.

LOLA GRANDAD SPEAKS OUT: ‘My son is no killer.’

The photo was of an overweight man with iron-grey hair and a jowly face that would once have been handsome. The gutter journalist writing the piece mentioned Terry Harper agreeing to meet him in his local pub, and the photo showed him standing outside it. Rachel googled it. The Hand and Flowers, Whiteley. She then checked the electoral register and found Terry’s address on a housing estate in Whiteley, a few miles from Eastwell.

Brickall wandered back into the office with a slice of pizza and a can of Coke.

Rachel shook her head vigorously as he went to sit down. ‘You can eat that in the car. We’re off to talk to Lola Jade’s grandfather.’

---

Terry Harper was wary, which she had expected. He was a short man, so short that even Brickall loomed over him. The three of them filled the cramped hallway of his modest bungalow.

‘How much will I get paid?’ he asked, when she told him they wanted to talk about Lola’s disappearance.

‘Paid?’

‘By your paper?’

‘We’re not journalists,’ she corrected him. ‘We’re police officers. Working in crime investigation support.’

Terry tutted at this, but led them through into a small, over-furnished living room. There were family photos on display, including one of Gavin and Michelle’s wedding; the bride resplendent in her shiny meringue.

Rachel poised herself gingerly on a Dralon armchair, decked out with an antimacassar, that reminded her of her mother’s house. Brickall took the sofa.

‘I’m going to come straight to the point, Mr Harper,’ he said. ‘Do you know where Gavin is? Or why he’s disappeared?’

He shook his head vehemently. ‘Honest to God, I don’t. I mean, I’ve tried phoning him, obviously, but his mobile’s disconnected. All I’m hoping—’

‘Do you think he has Lola Jade with him?’ Rachel leaned forward and engaged eye contact.

Terry hunched his shoulders in a helpless gesture. ‘I mean, he must have, mustn’t he?’

Rachel looked at him sharply. ‘Why do you say that, Terry?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s just the obvious explanation. Why else would he do a runner like that? But he wouldn’t hurt her, I know that. He wouldn’t hurt a hair on that precious kiddie’s head.’

Rachel thought back to the DNA sample found in Lola’s room. ‘How was her relationship with her dad? Did she enjoy spending time with him?’

‘She adored him. Adores him,’ he corrected himself.

‘So there were no… issues between them?’ Rachel was aware that she was pussyfooting, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to ask if he thought his son was abusing his own daughter.

Terry shook his head. ‘To be fair, there was that time when Michelle reported him to the police for not taking her back on time. But he had his reasons,’ he added darkly.

Rachel raised her eyebrows.

‘Husband-and-wife stuff, you know. She likes playing games, does our Michelle.’

Brickall shot Rachel a look.

‘Go on,’ Rachel said to Terry.

‘Their relationship was what you might call volatile.’

‘Michelle seems to think Gavin could be in Spain,’ Brickall interjected. ‘Do you think that’s true?’

‘Could be. He’s spent time over there, you know, speaks some Spanish, so I suppose it would be relatively easy for him.’

‘And your other son – where is he?’ demanded Brickall.

Terry looked confused. ‘My other son? I’ve only got the one. Gavin.’

It was Rachel’s turn to look confused. ‘What about Andy?’

The penny dropped, and Terry’s face relaxed into a smile. ‘Ah, Andy! Andy’s not mine, he’s my ex-wife’s kid. He and Gav are half-brothers, you know? Pat and I split when Gavin was a nipper, and she remarried soon after and had a couple more kids: Andy and Karen.

‘Ah, I see.’ Rachel smiled back. That would explain their singular failure to track down Andy Harper. ‘Michelle showed me photos and they were so alike, I just assumed…’

‘They both look like their mother.’

‘So Andy’s surname?’ asked Brickall.

‘Whittier. Andy Whittier.’

---

‘Easy to find someone in 2017 when you’ve got the name right,’ mused Rachel as Brickall drove them back along the main road that led back towards London. ‘I’ve just gone into Facebook and found him right away.’ She held up her phone. ‘If this is correct, then Andy Whittier’s still living in the Eastwell area.’

‘Bloody hell, does that mean you want me to turn round?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘We could get his home address from the PNC, but right now he’s probably going to be at work, not at home.’

‘His employment status will be on Facebook too, dummy!’

Rachel checked, and sure enough it was. ‘According to his profile, Andy works at JBH Distribution Ltd,’ she read out to Brickall, then broke into a grin. ‘It supplies building and construction materials. And conveniently, the address is London Road, Whiteley. We just passed it about quarter of a mile back.’

Swearing under his breath, Brickall executed a sharp U-turn.

The receptionist at JBH explained that there were two shifts: early, from 7.30 until 4.00, and late, from 11 till 7.30. Andy Whittier was on an early that day. It was now 3.30, so they parked outside and waited.

‘One thing…’ Rachel said, washing down painkillers with a bottle of water. ‘Did you read the forensic report from Lola’s room?’

Brickall shook his head.

‘The paternal DNA sample found on the carpet. It was semen, for fuck’s sake. What’s that all about?’

‘I’m pretty sure Surrey CID will have asked him that. Funny old thing, though: we can’t question him ourselves because he’s done a bunk.’

Rachel sighed. ‘Mind you, I can’t find anything that suggests he’s a paedo.’

‘That doesn’t rule it out. But then the presence of the DNA doesn’t rule it in either. Any number of reasons you might get your jiz smeared in your kid’s room.’

Rachel looked askance at him. ‘Seriously, Detective Sergeant? And Harper wasn’t living there either. Bit bloody weird.’

Brickall exhaled hard, making a whistling sound through his teeth. ‘The whole case is weird, if you ask me.’ Workers from the early shift had started streaming out of a side entrance. ‘Okay, who are we looking for?’

Rachel took out her phone and flicked back through the images she had captured from Michelle’s photo album until she reached the one of Gavin Harper with his brother, holding it up to Brickall. The two men were sitting under a coconut-palm pergola at a beachside bar, shades on the top of their heads, a strip of cobalt-blue sea in the background.

At 4.05, a man strode into the car park, rucksack slung over his shoulder, car keys in hand, and Brickall said, ‘Bingo!’

‘Andy!’ Rachel climbed out of the car and placed herself between Whittier and his own vehicle. ‘Andy, hi. My name’s DI Rachel Prince. Could we have a word?’

He tilted his shoulder down and attempted to barge past her. ‘Sorry, I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve all had enough hassle.’

‘Just an informal chat.’ Rachel used her recent boxing training to block him. ‘Otherwise we’ll be bringing you into London with us for a formal interview.’

He hesitated, looking her up and down again. He had an attractive face, Rachel thought, with regular features and warm brown eyes. ‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘But not here. There’s a place a couple of hundred yards up the road, towards the bypass. Sid’s Caff.’