‘I don’t think it’s your fault, Kayla.’

The woman offered a small shrug of her shoulders. ‘The other officers talked me through everything and I saw the CCTV footage. He was walking home from school the same way he always did. I would pick him up if it was raining and I keep thinking, what if it was raining? I mean it rains up here all the bloody time, doesn’t it? It’s always pissing down but, on the one day it would actually have helped, it was dry.’

Isaac had disappeared on his way back from school. Camera footage was limited but they had images of him on a device placed outside a newsagent’s on his route home. The next time he would have been spotted was four hundred metres away on a traffic camera but by then he was gone. Cars going into and out of the area had been checked with no clues and there were apparently no witnesses to anything. It was as if he had simply vanished.

Jessica was struggling to know what to say and beginning to wish she had brought someone else with her but Kayla broke the awkward silence.

‘I’ve still got his Christmas present upstairs,’ she said. ‘He wanted that new games console thing. Mike went to the city centre and waited in a queue at midnight when it first came out because everyone was saying they’d sell out straight away. It’s wrapped up under our bed. I guess when he first disappeared I just thought he’d be back in time to have it.’

Jessica was becoming more and more uncomfortable. She tried to say something reassuring but Kayla spoke again, this time in a slightly harsher tone. ‘No one’s told me anything. I had someone asking me questions about a football kit, then something about a car. All everyone ever says is that they’ll keep me up to date with developments. I’ve had to keep Jenny off school because of the other kids. She’s only thirteen . . .’

Kayla tailed off again and this time there were definitely tears. She reached forward and took a tissue from the coffee table, blowing her nose loudly.

Jessica was trying to see both sides. The woman would obviously want to know who had taken her son and why but, if she had too much information which she then revealed either to the media or her relatives, it could end up harming the investigation. Although the press had reported on the car crash, some of the most important details had been kept back, largely because they didn’t really know what the dead driver looked like. They hadn’t had anything back from the woodland dig, the clothes they had found or the allotment connection either.

At some point the media would be brought in but it wouldn’t do any good if they released all of the information in one go because they didn’t yet know if it all linked together. Jessica had seen the media used in a bad way a few years previously when one murder completely unconnected to a serial killer was assumed to have been done by him. The resulting coverage had created big problems for both investigations and she was glad people had learned their lessons.

Almost as if on cue following Kayla’s outburst, Jessica heard a voice coming from somewhere just outside the room. ‘Mum?’

A girl with straight blonde hair down to her shoulders walked in. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a tight wool jumper. She eyed Jessica suspiciously but barely got into the room before Kayla turned around and spoke sternly. ‘Jen, I told you to wait upstairs.’

‘I know but I’m hungry.’

Jessica stood, knowing it was a good time to go. Kayla rose too and peered from Jessica to her daughter then back again. ‘Are you leaving?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure there’s anything else I can help with,’ Jessica said.

The woman blew her nose again, pocketing the tissue. She gave a small, entirely unconvincing smile. Jessica returned it, then took out a business card and left it on the coffee table before saying her goodbyes and walking back to her car. She knew the meeting hadn’t gone well but had no idea how she could have made it any better.

As Jessica arrived back at her vehicle, she took out her mobile phone. There was a single text message from Izzy: ‘Know uve got big morning & dint wanna interrupt. Call when u can.’

Jessica phoned her colleague. ‘Did you want me?’

‘We found something in the old case files,’ Diamond said. ‘It’s not been transferred to the computers and the whole thing’s a bloody shambles but we think we know where those clothes in the woods come from.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘Nope but it’s going to sound horribly familiar. Fourteen years ago an eleven-year-old boy went missing from around here. He was never found but, when he disappeared, he was wearing a light blue Manchester City shirt and a pair of jeans.’

8

Jessica struggled with what to say before finally managing to get the words out. ‘Why didn’t anyone remember this? There must be people around now who were working back then?’

‘I have no idea, I’m just pulling everything together. Are you on your way back?’

‘Yeah, I won’t be long.’

Lunchtime traffic was as infuriating as ever but Jessica avoided the main roads and managed to arrive at the station without too much swearing. She walked purposefully through to the main floor but Izzy was nowhere to be seen. Rowlands told Jessica their colleague was in Reynolds’s office, which was down the hallway from her own. While Jessica’s half of her office was a complete mess, the inspector was definitely one of the tidier colleagues she knew. An outsider would never have guessed after Jessica knocked and entered his room. His desk had been shunted off to the side, while he and Izzy were sitting on the floor with a mass of papers spread across the surface. As Jessica opened the door, a gust of air sent half-a-dozen sheets of paper blowing across the room to disapproving looks from both of them.

‘Sorry,’ Jessica said.

Reynolds waved her in properly, pointing at a spot on the floor next to them. ‘Take a seat.’

‘Why are you working from the floor?’ Jessica asked but was met by pitying looks from her colleagues as if she had asked the stupidest of stupid questions.

Izzy leant across and picked up the papers that had been dislodged, then answered. ‘There’s more room down here.’

Jessica still wasn’t convinced. ‘We do have tables. Upstairs, in the incident room, in the Press Pad.’ It was clear her colleagues weren’t interested in her complaining so she crouched and sat cross-legged next to Izzy. Reynolds winked at her to acknowledge her objections but she could see there was a serious look in his eyes.

‘We’ve already been upstairs to see the DCI if you were wondering,’ he said. ‘He’s busy trying to get an excavation team in to go through the woods properly while we go over this. Some of the other officers have got photocopies of these documents too and are looking into things.’

Jessica said what it seemed they were all thinking. ‘Are we assuming there’s a body buried in those woods?’ The other detectives said nothing but Jessica knew that was exactly the reasoning. She leant back against the door. ‘What have we got?’

Izzy handed Jessica a photograph of a boy with sandy-coloured short hair. He was grinning at the camera, wearing a school uniform. Izzy was clearly already familiar with the file as she spoke quickly and confidently. ‘That’s Toby Whittaker. Fourteen years ago he was playing on a disused industrial park with some of his friends. It was just wasteland and, from what his mates said at the time, was somewhere lots of young people would hang around playing football and so on.’

Jessica knew the ‘so on’ probably referred to smoking and drinking if not a few other things as the constable continued.

‘Toby was only eleven at the time,’ Izzy went on. ‘But it looks like most of the people who hung around there were a bit older: fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds.’