There was a faint snort. ‘Don’t talk to me about that twat.’

‘Oh my God, Jade, it’s me, Chloe Hedges. F-U-Cancer. Where the fuck are we? What’s going on? I came to meet Shawn.’

‘Oh, babe, so did I! I got a text at this party last night. Shawn was there and he said he’d seen me and thought I was gorgeous. Asked me to meet him at this place down on the Thames called Platt’s Eyot. Shawn, I mean the bloke pretending to be him, said he had a houseboat and was going to meet me there.’

How stupid and naïve, Chloe thought, then stopped herself. She had been just as stupid, hadn’t she? They had both allowed their desperation, the years of fantasy about meeting Shawn, to blind them to danger. Exactly the same thing must have happened to Rose and Jess.

Jade’s words tumbled out. ‘So I was, like, waiting there, on the edge of the car park, looking around coz there was no sign of him and the whole place was deserted coz it was pissing down with rain, and I got my phone out to Snapchat who I thought was Shawn and he came up behind me and grabbed me, stuck a knife in my back and told me if I cried out, I was dead.’

Chloe could hear Jade panting, seemingly drained by the memory and the torrent of words.

‘It’s only just struck me, but I’m sure I’ve seen him before,’ Chloe said. ‘There’s something familiar about him.’

Jade didn’t respond. What did it matter, anyway? He had them now, and all that mattered was whether he let them live. Or if they would die here.

‘You handcuffed too?’ Chloe asked.

‘Yeah, and my feet are tied to some weird sort of stone bench thing. I can’t move. My legs have gone dead. Everything’s numb.’ Jade started to cry again.

‘I think I know why we’re here. Why he chose us, and Rose and Jess.’

‘What? Why?’

‘The StoryPad thing. It has to be that. It’s the only thing that connects the four of us.’

‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit.’ Chloe could almost hear Jade’s brain whirring in the darkness. ‘That’s why he brought us here.’

‘What?’

‘I never told you, did I?’ Jade said. ‘The day . . . the day it happened.’ She began to cry. ‘I had no idea. If I’d known she . . .’ Jade’s voice broke apart and she dissolved into sobs.

‘We’ll die of hypothermia if he leaves us here all night,’ Chloe said when Jade was finally silent. Already her voice was coming out all funny with cold – her mouth wasn’t working properly.

‘Oh God, why did I do it?’ Her voice tailed off and the fox wail returned. Chloe wanted to know exactly what Jade had done, but for now it was far more important to attempt to get out of here.

‘Shhh, Jade, listen. I heard you crying back from where he parked his car. There’s a road not far away. If we both scream, someone might hear us.’

More sniffing. ‘I’ve already tried. Nobody came.’

‘Yeah, but there’s two of us now. We need to get out of here before he gets back. Let’s try it – after three: one, two, three . . .’

Chloe filled her lungs, although it was absolute agony on her busted collarbone, and the two of them lifted their heads and screamed as loudly as they could, the sound filling the small, freezing grotto, bouncing off the shells and – Chloe prayed – through the gaps in the boarded-up windows and the weird arched doorway, out over the trees to the road.

They screamed and screamed until their voices cracked and sputtered to nothing, like a gust of wind blowing a candle flame back to darkness.

When they stopped screaming, a man’s voice came out of the ringing silence – his voice. ‘Are we quite finished?’

Chloe’s heart somersaulted in her broken chest. Jade screamed again.

She heard someone moving towards her. He had been here, in the darkness, all along.

Chapter 52

Day 14 – Patrick

Patrick and Carmella had arranged to meet at her flat, which was close to Chloe’s address, and were now together in Patrick’s car. As usual, Carmella looked as fresh as a newly bathed baby; her red curls in individually spaced, smooth spirals; her skin dewy-clear. Patrick had no idea how she did it. His skin felt prickly and sticky; his lower back aching from sitting in the car; his tinnitus whistling feedback in his ears; and his throat sore from constantly puffing on his e-cig. I’m falling apart, he thought.

‘Have you managed to get through to Gareth about Hammond’s bodyguard?’ he asked.

‘Not yet. He wasn’t answering.’ She produced her phone. ‘You think he’s our man?’

‘I don’t know. Have we encountered him?’ Patrick felt the need to consult his Moleskine, but it was back at the office.

Carmella had her phone to her ear, waiting for Gareth to answer. ‘I think he was there when we went to Global Sounds Music, waiting in reception . . . Hello, Gareth? You all right? Listen, what’s Mervyn Hammond’s bodyguard called? . . . Kerry Mangan. What do you know about him?’

Patrick half-listened, while trying to puzzle everything out at the same time. Mervyn had insisted he’d been set up, that the ‘LUCKY’ knickers had been planted at his house. The DNA result wasn’t back yet, but that didn’t matter. If, God forbid, Chloe and Jade had been abducted, then obviously Mervyn, who had been in police company all day, couldn’t be responsible. There was a chance he was connected, was orchestrating everything, but after what Chloe’s mother had said, Lennon had discounted him pretty much entirely – though he was glad they were still holding him. Hammond had shifted from number one suspect to their most important witness.

Because if the underwear had been planted at Mervyn’s house, it must have been put there by somebody who’d been at the party. The same man who’d called the next morning and left the anonymous tip. They knew for certain that Mangan had been at the party, and had given Jade a lift home. Had he arranged to meet her again later?

Was he the killer?

Whoever it was, they now had a probable motive to explain why the killer had taken the girls’ clothes from the two crime scenes. He had been saving them to plant on some other poor sucker. That poor sucker being Mervyn.

Carmella ended the call. ‘Mangan was with Hammond when they visited the children’s home. And while Gareth was talking, I remembered something Roisin told me in Ireland. She said something about Mervyn’s bodyguard being there, giving her dirty looks while Mervyn was persuading her to keep quiet. I’m pretty sure he was there at the signing at Waterstones too. I have this memory of him looking over at me and Wendy when I was talking to her . . .’

‘We need to get a photo to Chelsea Fox,’ Patrick said.

Carmella nodded. ‘Gareth told me that Mangan is ex-army, but was discharged back in the nineties for reasons Winkler was unable to ascertain. Let me ring Gareth back, see if he can get a photo now.’

‘Get an address first. We’ll go to Mangan’s now, assuming we can get his address. Then tell Gareth to get round to Chelsea Fox’s, show her Mangan’s photo.’

Adrenalin surged beneath Patrick’s skin. But running alongside the excitement, the conviction that they were close, so close, was a deep, horrible fear. Jess had been missing for twenty-four hours before her body was found, suggesting that the killer liked to play with his victims like a cat with a mouse.

Jade could already be dead. Possibly Chloe Hedges too – he’d instructed Rebecca to ring him the second she turned up, and there had been no call.

The alternative, Patrick thought with a shudder, was even worse. Both girls could be suffering torture, right now, begging not for their lives but to die. For the pain to end.