The final triumphant guitar chord of ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ rang out and the band bowed and smiled through the cheers.

The house lights came up and the crowd started shuffling out, streaming down stairs and through the venue’s reception, ready to do battle with the knock-off merchandise sellers and overcrowded Tube trains.

‘Best birthday present ever!’ Pat said as they pushed through to the exit. ‘Thanks, angel, I loved it.’

‘I could tell!’ Gill laughed, and kissed his cheek. ‘So did I.’

They were almost at the door when someone caught Patrick’s arm. ‘Mate!’ said a man. The man was young, muscular and very familiar-looking, although Patrick couldn’t place him. The fact that he wore mirror shades and a huge woollen fashion-victim cap didn’t help.

Patrick and Gill stopped, jostled on all sides by the departing crowd. ‘Yes?’ Patrick said suspiciously.

The man lowered his shades and flashed a smile at him. ‘It’s me – Shawn.’

Gill made a strange sound in her throat and started subconsciously fiddling with her hair. She’d recognised him before even Patrick had.

‘Shawn Barrett,’ he hissed. ‘Sorry about the shades, but you know . . .’

Patrick raised his eyebrows. Shawn Barrett. He remembered then that Shawn was a Cure fan too, via his grandfather. His grandfather, for fuck’s sake! he thought.

‘Quick word?’ Shawn dragged them to one side of the reception area. It was astonishing that nobody seemed to recognise him at all, but he guessed it was because most of the audience here were at least twenty years older than Shawn’s ‘target’ market.

‘This is my wife, Gill,’ Patrick said, grinning at Gill’s star-struck face as Shawn shook her hand. She wasn’t remotely a fan of OnTarget, but Shawn Barrett was a very good-looking bloke.

‘Awesome gig, wasn’t it?’ Shawn said, pulling at a tuft of facial hair under his lower lip. ‘Anyway, mate, just wanted to say good job, like, for catching Graham Burns and getting Mervyn off the hook. He can seem like a right twat, but he’s got a heart of gold, that one. And as for Burns, fucking hell, what a number. Doing that shit to those poor girls. Unbelievable! If I’d had any idea what he was like . . .’

Patrick couldn’t help but remember Carmella’s account of little Roisin McGreevy and how Shawn Barrett had ruined her life. And how ‘heart of gold’ Mervyn Hammond had had no qualms about buying her silence.

Still, he thought. Nothing was ever straightforward, was it? He had a brief flash of memory of Suzanne in the park, in her running gear . . . Fifty shades of grey, indeed. Wasn’t everything, where morals were concerned?

‘Hey, is it true?’ Shawn whispered. ‘That Mervyn is Graham’s dad?’

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ Patrick replied.

‘Ha!’ Shawn grinned his famous grin.

But it was true. Mervyn Hammond was Graham Burns’s father. After the ambulance had turned up and taken Graham away, under police escort, Patrick had gone back into the barn and released Mervyn, who sat shivering and snivelling on the chair. Patrick had a feeling Mervyn would never be the same after this.

‘It’s true, what I told him,’ Hammond had said as Patrick struggled with the wet rope that bound Mervyn to the chair. ‘He is my son. It was a long time ago, when I was just starting out and did the PR for this little club in the East End. I’ve never been, ah, a very sexual person.’

Patrick had wondered if he really wanted to hear this, but nodded for Hammond to continue.

‘But Sandy, that was her name, she had this magnetic quality. A seductive quality. We did it once, in a dressing room, thirty seconds of fumbling, and three months later she told me she was pregnant. I’m ashamed to say that I freaked out. I really didn’t want kids, and Sandy had a reputation . . . I accused her of lying, said she couldn’t know who the dad was because she slept around so much. She went away and I forgot all about it.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Made myself forget about it.’

‘But Graham ended up in the care system?’ Patrick had asked.

‘Yeah. But I didn’t find out about that for years. It was about ten years later, when I was starting to get pretty successful. I bumped into an old mate from the club who asked me if I’d heard about what happened to Sandy. He said she’d had the baby but hadn’t been able to cope, was still going out, taking drugs, sleeping around . . . leaving her son at home alone. Social services had intervened and taken the baby into care.’

Patrick had removed the rope, freeing Mervyn, but he remained in the same position, his head hanging low.

‘I knew the baby would be, what, nine or ten by this point. And I started to wonder . . . was he my son? My own dad had just died and I was feeling vulnerable, thinking about family and the meaning of life, all that shit.’ He laughed without humour. ‘So I decided to track down Sandy’s little boy, spoke to some social workers . . . greased a few palms. And there he was, at St Mary’s. They told me he had a lot of behavioural issues, that they hadn’t been able to place him in long-term foster care or find anyone to adopt him because he was too difficult.’

Mervyn had pushed himself to his feet, bones and joints cracking. He’d drifted over to his model railway, watched the locomotives running round the track, a faraway look in his eye.

‘I still didn’t know if he was my son . . . until I saw him. The second I laid eyes on him, I knew. He was my flesh and blood. But . . . I didn’t have room for a kid in my life. I was so busy, travelling here, there and everywhere, working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. I thought he was better off where he was. The solution, I thought, was for me to start visiting St Mary’s, under the guise of a mentor, helping coach the troubled kids. I mean, I still do it now. I enjoy it. It makes me feel like I’m atoning for my past mistakes, for all the bad stuff I’ve done.’

Patrick had nodded.

‘But I kept a close eye on Graham. Him and his little girlfriend, Melanie. They were inseparable, you know. If anyone did anything to hurt her . . . well.’

‘He’d hurt them?’

‘I never knew what he did. But whatever it was, the person who’d upset Melanie never went near her again.’ Hammond had fiddled with the controls of his train set. ‘I didn’t even know he was still in touch with her, after they left St Mary’s. I thought she was off the scene. Because I took him out of that world, got him jobs, helped him – like an invisible, guiding hand. A guardian angel. That’s what I thought anyway.’

Mervyn had looked like he was on the verge of passing out.

‘Funnily enough, I mentioned Melanie to Graham the other day, asked him if he was still in touch with “that weird girl” he used to be so crazy about. He snapped at me, said she wasn’t weird. But I didn’t think anything of it.’

‘When was this?’

Mervyn had gone quiet and Patrick had thought he’d slipped into shock. But then he’d said, ‘Monday. The day before the party.’

At that point, more paramedics had arrived and taken Mervyn out to an ambulance and to hospital to be checked over. Patrick had stood in the converted barn for a while. He expected this would all come out at the trial. Mervyn Hammond’s career would be ruined. And Patrick wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He thought about Mervyn mentioning Melanie to Graham. Was that why Graham had chosen to frame Mervyn, because he was angry about him calling Melanie weird? Patrick had wondered why Graham had left more than a week between targeting Rose and Jess and then Chloe and Jade. This was something he intended to ask Graham, but his guess was that Graham had been scared after the police visited Global Sounds, decided to lie low. Maybe Mervyn had stirred up Graham’s anger again, prompting him to finish what he’d started sooner rather than later.

An examination of Graham’s phone had answered the final question. As Peter Bell had predicted, a cache of photos Graham had sent to the girls through Snapchat had been stored in a folder on the phone. They knew exactly how he’d lured them to their deaths. The evidence against Burns was rock solid. Even if he had the best lawyer in the world, he was going to prison probably for the rest of his life.