But as he climbed the stairs, being careful not to spill any wine, he had something infinitely more important on his mind. He stopped at the top, thinking.

Max called out, ‘You can have any colour you want except green, Daddy. I’m having green. OK?’

‘OK,’ he called back. ‘You’re having green!’

Max won the first race easily. Squatting on the carpet in his son’s bedroom, holding the remote control, Tom could not get his brain to focus on the track. He crashed on the first bend in the second race, then went off again at the next opportunity, scattering tyres and bales of straw. Then he somersaulted into a grandstand.

For the past two hours, since he had seen the photograph of Janie Stretton in the Evening Standard, then seen her again on the Six O’Clock News when he’d got home, his brain had been mush.

He could not just ignore any more what had happened. Yet that email which had trashed his computer showed him this person or these people – whoever – were serious.

Which meant the threat was serious.

Was there really any useful information he could give to the police? All he had seen was a couple of minutes of the young woman being stabbed by a hooded figure. Was there really anything there which could help the police?

Anything worth risking the safety of his family for?

He played the argument over and over. And each time he came to the inescapable conclusion that yes, there might be something that could help the police. Otherwise why would the threats have been made against him?

He needed to discuss it with Kellie, he realized. Would she believe him, that he had innocently stuck the CD into his computer?

And if she was against him going to the police, what then? What would his conscience say to him?

The people he had always admired in his life, the true heroes, past and present, were those men and women who were prepared to confront things that were wrong. To stand up and be counted.

Tom watched Max for some moments, eyes alert, fingers expertly dancing around the controls, his truck hurtling around the track. Outside there was a lull in the music and he heard Jessica laughing gleefully.

Didn’t they also have a say in the matter?

Did he have a right to put their lives in jeopardy over what he believed in? What would his own father have done in this situation?

God, it was at a time like this that he missed his parents so much. If he could have gone to them and asked their advice, how much easier that would have been.

He thought about his father, a decent man who had worked as a sales manager for a German company that manufactured industrial cleaning brushes. A tall, gentle man, and a verger at the local Anglican church, he worshipped every Sunday of his life, and was rewarded by God by having his head chopped off by the tailgate of a milk lorry on the M1 motorway at the age of forty-four.

His father would have given him a Christian perspective, no doubt the responsible citizen view, that Tom should report what he had seen and also the threat. But he had never been able to share his father’s faith in God.

He would ask Kellie, he decided. She had a lot of wisdom. Whatever she said, he would abide by.

32

The clumsily handwritten poster Sellotaped to the glass pane of the door said: brent mackenzie. world-famous clairvoyant. here tonight only! A large fluorescent yellow strip across it read: sorry, sold out!

Outwardly the building did not look that promising. Grace had been expecting a fairly spacious hall, but the Brighton Holistic Centre appeared to occupy nothing grander than a small corner shop, with its exterior painted a rather garish pink.

A woman in her forties, wearing a black smock over a grey leotard and with slightly mad hair, stood on the other side of the door, collecting tickets. Grace took his wallet out of his pocket, dug his fingers into it and retrieved his ticket, which he had purchased several weeks earlier.

He felt nervous. A disconcerting jangling deep inside him seemed to strip away his natural confidence. It was always the same before he saw a medium or clairvoyant, or any other kind of psychic. The anticipation. The hope he held in his heart that this one might be different, that this one finally, after close on nine long years, would have the answer.

Either a message, or a location, or a sign.

Something that would tell him whether Sandy was dead or alive. That was the most important thing he needed to know. Sure, there would be all kinds of other questions that would then follow whichever answer he got. But first, please, he needed that answer.

Maybe tonight?

He handed over his ticket and followed three nervously chatting girls up the narrow staircase. They looked like sisters, the youngest in her late teens, the oldest in her mid-twenties. He passed an unpainted door marked quiet, therapy in session, and entered a room that had about twenty assorted plastic chairs squeezed in, forming an L-shape with a gap where he presumed the clairvoyant would stand. There were blue blinds, pot plants on the shelves, and a print of a Provençal landscape on one wall.

Most of the chairs were already taken. Two young girls were with their mum, a pudding-faced lady in a baggy knitted top, who seemed to be fighting back tears. Next to them sat a long-haired earth mother of about seventy in a floral top, denim skirt and glasses the size of a snorkeller’s mask.

Grace found a free chair next to two men in their late twenties, both wearing jeans and sweatshirts. One, grossly overweight, with ragged hair that reminded Grace of the comedian Ken Dodd, was staring blankly ahead and chewing gum. The other, much thinner, was sweating profusely and brandishing a can of Pepsi Cola in his hand as if it afforded him some status. Grace overheard some of their conversation; they were discussing electric screwdrivers.

Another mother and daughter entered the room and took the remaining two chairs, next to him. The daughter, thin as a rake and dressed to party in black trousers and red blouse, reeked of a scent that smelled, to Grace, of lavatory freshener. The mother, equally dolled up, looked like a computer-aged image of the daughter twenty years on. Grace was familiar with the technique; it was used frequently in the search for missing persons. A year ago he’d had a photograph of Sandy put through the process and been staggered by how much someone could change in just eight years.

There was an air of expectation in the room. Grace glanced around at the faces, wondering why they were all here; some because they were recently bereaved, he guessed, but probably most were just lost souls in need of guidance. And they had each forked out ten quid to meet a complete stranger with no medical or sociological qualifications, who was about to tell each of them stuff that could alter their entire approach to life.

Stuff that the spirits channelled through Brent Mackenzie, or so he would claim. Grace knew; he’d seen it all.

And yet he kept coming back for more.

It was like a drug: just one more fix and then he would stop. But of course he would never stop, not until the day he found out the truth about Sandy’s disappearance. Maybe the spirits would tell Brent Mackenzie tonight; maybe the clairvoyant would do what all those before him had failed to do, and pluck it out of the ether.

Roy Grace knew the reputational risk he ran by pursing his interest in mediums and clairvoyants, but he was not the only police officer in the UK to regularly consult them, not by a long way. And, regardless of what the cynics said, Grace believed in the supernatural. He had no option. He had seen a ghost – two ghosts, in fact – many times during his childhood.

Every summer he used to go and stay for a week with his uncle and aunt, in their cottage in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. In a grand town house opposite two very sweet old ladies used to wave at him from a bay window on the top floor. It wasn’t until years later, revisiting Bembridge after a long absence, that he learned that the house had been empty for over forty years – the two old ladies who waved at him had committed suicide in 1947. And it hadn’t been his imagination; other people had seen them also, including his uncle and aunt.