Banks admitted he couldn’t. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“I’ll get you an ashtray. You’re lucky Mary’s over at her mother’s.” He winked. “She’d never allow it.” Woodward produced a heavy glass ashtray from the cupboard by the door and surprised Banks by pulling a crumpled packet of Embassy Regal from the shirt pocket under his beige V-neck sweater. He then went on to surprise him even further by suggesting a wee dram. “Nowt fancy, mind. Just Bell’s.”

“Bell’s would be fine,” said Banks. He’d have just the one, as he had a long drive home. The first sip, after they clinked glasses, tasted wonderful. It was everything to do with the cold rain lashing at the bay windows.

“Did you get to know Lucy at all?” he asked.

Woodward sipped his Bell’s neat and grimaced. “Barely spoke to her. Or any of the kids, for that matter. We left them to the social workers. We’d enough on our hands with the parents.”

“Can you tell me how it went down?”

Woodward ran his hand over his hair, then took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Good Lord, this is going back a bit,” he said.

“Whatever you can remember.”

“Oh, I remember everything as if it was yesterday. That’s the problem.”

Banks tapped some ash from his cigarette and waited for George Woodward to focus his memory on the one day he would probably sooner forget.

“It was pitch-black when we went in,” Woodward began. “And cold as a witch’s tit. The eleventh of February, it was. 1990. There was me and Baz – Barry Stevens, my DS – in one car. The bloody heater didn’t work properly, I remember, and we were almost blue with cold when we got to Alderthorpe. All the puddles were frozen. There were about three more cars and a van, for the social workers to isolate the kids, like. We were working off a tip from one of the local schoolteachers who’d got suspicious about some of the truancies, the way the kids looked and behaved and, especially, the disappearance of Kathleen Murray.”

“She’s the one who was killed, right?”

“That’s right. Anyway, there were a couple of lights on in the houses when we got there, and we marched straight up and bashed our way in – we had a warrant – and that was when we… we saw it.” He was silent for a moment, staring somewhere beyond Banks, beyond the bay window, beyond even the North Sea. Then he took another nip of whiskey, coughed and went on. “Of course, we didn’t know who was who at first. The two households were mixed up and nobody knew who’d fathered who anyway.”

“What did you find?”

“Most of them were asleep until we bashed the doors in. They had a vicious dog, took a chunk out of Baz as we went in. Then we found Oliver Murray and Pamela Godwin – brother and sister – in a bed with one of the Godwin girls: Laura.”

“Lucy’s sister.”

“Yes. Dianne Murray, the second-eldest child, was curled up safe and sound in a room with her brother Keith, but their sister, Susan, was sandwiched between the other two adults.” He swallowed. “The place was a pigsty – both of them were – smelled terrible. Someone had knocked a hole through the living-room wall so they could travel back and forth without going outside and being seen.” He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. “It’s hard to get across the sense of squalor, of depravity you could feel there, but it was tangible, something you could touch and taste. I don’t just mean the dirt, the stains, the smells, but more than that. A sort of spiritual squalor, if you catch my drift. Everyone was terrified, of course, especially the kids.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, looking back, I wonder if we couldn’t have done it some other way, some gentler way. I don’t know. Too late for that now, anyroad.”

“I understand you found evidence of satanic rituals?”

“In the cellar of the Godwin house, yes.”

“What did you find?”

“The usual. Incense, robes, books, pentagram, an altar – no doubt on which the virgin would be penetrated. Other occult paraphernalia. You know what my theory is?”

“No. What?”

“These people weren’t witches or Satanists; they were just sick and cruel perverts. I’m sure they used the Satanism as an excuse to take drugs and dance and chant themselves into a frenzy. All that satanic rigmarole – the candles, magic circles, robes, music, chanting and whatnot – it was just something to make it all seem like a game to the children. It was just something that played with their minds, like, didn’t let the poor buggers know whether what they were doing was what was supposed to be happening – playing with Mummy and Daddy even if it hurt sometimes and they punished you when you were bad – or something way out, way over-the-top. It was both, of course. No wonder they couldn’t understand. And all those trappings, they just helped turn it into a kid’s game, ring around the roses, that’s all.”

Satanic paraphernalia had also been found in the Paynes’s cellar. Banks wondered if there was a connection. “Did any of them profess any sort of belief in Satan at any time?”

“Oliver and Pamela tried to confuse the jury with some sort of gobbledygook about the Great Horned God and 666 at their trial, but nobody took a blind bit of notice of them. Trappings, that’s all it were. A kid’s game. Let’s all go down in the cellar and dress up and play.”

“Where was Lucy?”

“Locked in a cage – we later found out it was a genuine Morrison shelter left over from the war – in the cellar of the Murray house along with her brother, Tom. It was where you got put if you misbehaved or disobeyed, we found out later. We never did find out what the two of them had done to get put there, though, because they wouldn’t talk.”

“Wouldn’t or couldn’t?”

“Wouldn’t. They wouldn’t talk out against the adults, their parents. They’d been abused and messed up in their minds too long to dare put it into words.” He paused a moment. “Sometimes, I don’t think they could have expressed it all anyway, no matter how much they tried. I mean, where does a nine-year-old or an eleven-year-old find the language and points of reference she needs to explain something like that? They weren’t just protecting their parents or shutting up in fear of them – it went deeper than that. Anyway, Tom and Linda… They were both naked and dirty, crawling in their own filth, looked as if they hadn’t eaten for a couple of days – I mean, most of the children were malnourished and neglected, but they were worse. There was a bucket in the cage, and the smell… And Linda, well, she was twelve, and it showed. She was… I mean they’d made no provisions for… you know… time of the month. I’ll never forget the look of shame and fear and defiance on that little kid’s face when Baz and I walked in on them and turned the light on.”

Banks took a sip of Bell’s, waited until it had burned all the way down, then asked, “What did you do?”

“First off, we found some blankets for them, as much for warmth’s sake as modesty’s, because there wasn’t much heat in the place, either.”

“After that?”

“We handed them over to the social workers.” He gave a little shudder. “One of them couldn’t handle it. Well-meaning young lass, thought she was tough, but she didn’t have the stomach.”

“What did she do?”

“Went back to the car and wouldn’t get out. Just sat there hunched up, shivering and crying. There was no one to pay her much mind as we all had our hands full. Me and Baz were mostly occupied with the adults.”

“Did they have much to say?”

“Nah. Surly lot. And Pamela Godwin – well, there was clearly summat wrong with her. In the head. She didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on. Kept on smiling and asking us if we wanted a cup of tea. Her husband, though, Michael, I’ll never forget him. Greasy hair, straggly beard and that look in his dark eyes. You ever seen pictures of that American killer, Charles Manson?”

“Yes.”

“Like him. That’s who Michael Godwin reminded me of: Charles Manson.”