Gareth looked like he was going to be sick.

‘So what do you want to do now? Go in, see if we can catch him with his . . . with his pants down?’

Winkler thought about it. ‘No, if we could sneak in through a window, surprise him . . . But that’s not going to happen. I bet you he’ll have an excuse for coming here. “Market research” or something,’ he said, waggling his forefingers in quote marks. ‘Wait here.’

He got out of the car and jogged into the forecourt of St Mary’s, then took a couple of snaps of Hammond’s car on his phone, making sure the building was clearly visible in the background.

Before getting back in the Audi and driving away, he looked up at the closed curtains and felt the bile rise in his throat as he imagined what might be going on behind them. He made a silent vow.

Hammond was going to spend the rest of his life shivering in a cell, fearing for his arse and his life. But first Winkler needed some evidence.

Either that or a confession.

Chapter 40

Day 13 – Patrick

Patrick was back in his car, sitting in the station car park yet again while he called Tenpin’s head office. He didn’t want anyone overhearing and asking why he was ringing them when he ought to be concentrating on Rose and Jessica. He was also taking the opportunity to charge up his e-cigarette in the car’s phone charger – it had run out after only two puffs that morning, and he was dying for a nicotine fix.

After a twenty-minute wait while the director of HR tracked down all the CVs received for the current job advertised at the Kingston Rotunda, Patrick had the address of a girl with the incongruously glamorous name Chelsea Fox. He was sure she was the one he needed to talk to. Not only had she not showed up to her interview the previous day, with no reason given, but the scan of her application form said under Additional Comments:

I know Tenpin in the Rotunda really really well its my faverite place to hang out with my mates so I would totally love to work there and you wouldn’t even need to show me around there ☺

Tutting at the misspelling and inappropriate font, he jotted down the address at the top of her meagre CV – it was indeed the Kennedy Estate – and rang the mobile number. Somewhat to his surprise, Chelsea answered on the first ring.

‘Yeah?’

‘Chelsea Fox?’

‘Yeah. Who is it?’

Patrick cleared his throat. ‘Ah, hello, Miss Fox. My name is . . .’ He looked around the car park for inspiration, his eyes lighting on Winkler’s flash car. ‘. . . Adrian Wilson, assistant director of HR at Tenpin Leisure Group. I’m just ringing to ask if there was some kind of mix-up regarding your interview yesterday, since we didn’t hear from you – we were expecting you in our Kingston office at 2.30 p.m.’

There was a brief silence, then a feeble, artificial-sounding cough. ‘Oh yeah, I’m ever so sorry, I was ill, I’ve got the flu, and my phone had run out of credit, so I couldn’t let you know, I was going to email, but I felt too ill, I’ve been off school and everything . . .’

Patrick decided not to point out that it was half-term.

‘Please don’t worry, Miss Fox. Are you still too unwell to come in for an interview, if we reschedule for tomorrow?’

More fake coughing. ‘Yeah, sorry.’

‘Well, not to worry. We’ll be in touch if another suitable vacancy arises. I take it you’re at home tucked up in bed and keeping warm?’

‘Yeah,’ she said feebly.

Patrick wished her well – the flaky little mare – terminated the call and switched on the car engine. He very much doubted he’d find her tucked up in bed smelling of Vicks VapoRub, but hopefully she was at least telling the truth when she said she was currently at home.

Twenty minutes later, he was suppressing a brief shudder as the familiar towers of the Kennedy Estate rose above him. He hadn’t set foot on it for over a year, since he and Carmella had tracked down two other wayward teenagers who had run away and hidden here.

His professional life seemed full of recalcitrant teens, he reflected as he got out of the car. He made a vow to do everything in his power to keep Bonnie on the straight and narrow once she hit puberty – although with her start in life, who could blame her if she did go off the rails? He was dreading the point, surely not too many years away, when she would find out that her mother had tried to kill her when she was a baby. He and Gill would have to tell her first, to prevent her from stumbling across it online or being told by a ghoulish classmate.

Then he wondered if he and Gill would even still be together in a few years’ time to have that conversation. It took several deep drags on his now-charged e-cig to help shift the thought as he headed for Block B.

The estate was actually looking a lot better than it had last year. It had clearly been given, if not a makeover, a bit of much-needed TLC. There were new little shrubs dotted about the grounds, and the doors had all been painted a kind of dull green, the same shade that Patrick used to paint his Airfix models.

‘Olive Drab,’ he said out loud, putting the e-cig in his coat pocket.

The lobby no longer stank of piss either, which was a pleasant surprise. He pressed the door buzzer of Chelsea Fox’s ground-floor flat and waited. Nobody came, but he thought he heard a movement inside, so he buzzed again.

Eventually a bolt shot back and the door opened a tiny crack. Even though it was fairly obvious that Foxy’s name was a derivative of her surname, Patrick had still made a mental assumption that the girl would be sharp-faced and ginger-haired, so he couldn’t help but feel surprised when instead the face, from the small portion of it he could see, belonged to a very pretty black teenager.

‘Chelsea Fox?’ he asked doubtfully, holding out his ID badge.

The eye widened in the gap.

‘Is your mum or dad in? My name is Patrick Lennon, I’m a police officer. Nothing to worry about at all, but I just need to ask you a few questions. May I come in?’

‘I live with my nan.’

‘Well, is she in, then?’

‘I can’t let you in. She’d kill me if she knew you were here!’

Patrick moved slightly closer to the door. ‘Chelsea, please. I think you can help me. You haven’t done anything, so there’s nothing to worry about.’

The eye filled with tears and the door shut in his face. He felt a small thrill of excitement, the knowledge that this almost certainly wasn’t a wild goose chase. She knew something.

He buzzed again, and called through the door. ‘Chelsea. If you don’t let me in now, I’m going to have to stand out here till your nan gets back, and then she’ll definitely know I was here. Come on. I just need a few minutes of your time.’

The door opened again, slightly wider but on a chain.

‘You don’t look like a cop.’

He held his badge closer to the crack. ‘A few minutes,’ he repeated, and finally Chelsea let him in.

They stood in the narrow hallway and Patrick took in the girl standing next to him. She had a sweet face, huge brown eyes under a wide forehead, although her cheeks were spotty and she had the puppy fat of a twelve-year-old. Anyone less like a ‘Foxy’ he couldn’t imagine.

‘Is there somewhere we can sit down?’ he asked, and she led him through to a small living room, claustrophobically warm. Two plump black cats sat curled up, one at each end of a much-clawed sofa, like two cushions. Cat hair covered every surface, making Pat want to sneeze, but apart from that the room was immaculately tidy. There was a door off either side of the room – one open and one closed – and through the open one Patrick saw a familiar sight: the four chiselled youths from OnTarget staring at him from a poster on the wall. Could mean nothing at all, he thought. Most teens have at least one.