‘All just words, killing’s killing.’

He put the phone down and lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Leeds and dead prostitutes. Don’t use the ‘R’ word. He turned to Barbara and patted her back. ‘Want a cup of tea, love?’

He could do without a trio of dead women on his plate. If there were no women, men wouldn’t kill them. That would be one solution to the problem.

Carol Braithwaite. Wondered where that kiddy was. Locked in that flat for weeks with the mother’s body. Barry couldn’t remember his name. Tracy had banged on about him for months. Michael. That was it. Michael Braithwaite.

1975: 10 April

The next day on the kiddies’ ward. Uncomfortable place to be. Tracy touched the little hand, slack in sleep, with the back of hers. ‘Michael,’ she said softly.

Tracy had considered taking him a teddy bear but thought that perhaps he was too old for a soft toy. When they broke into the Lovell Park flat he had been clutching a blue-and-white police car as if his life depended on it, so she bought him a fire engine instead. Tucked it in beside him. He was hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked but he looked peaceful in repose. They reckoned he’d been in the flat with his mother’s body for nearly three weeks. He had been unable to unlock the front door. No one had seen him standing on a chair at the fifteenth-floor window, waving to attract attention. He had lived off what food there was in the house – Carol Braithwaite had been to the supermarket that afternoon, there were unpacked shopping bags in the kitchen. After that, he’d pulled packets of dry food from cupboards, drunk water from the tap. It was freezing in the flat. He’d fed the meter with coins from his mother’s purse until the coins ran out.

He’d pulled a blanket over his mother to keep her warm. Tracy supposed that at first he must have slept next to her. By the time they broke in he was sleeping in a den he had made from a nest of cushions and blankets in the living room. ‘Tough little bugger,’ Lomax said. Perhaps he was a boy used to fending for himself. All this reported to her third-hand by Arkwright.

Linda Pallister appeared suddenly at the opposite side of the hospital bed as if she’d been lurking nearby. ‘You again,’ she said to Tracy by way of greeting.

‘Want to get a cuppa?’ Tracy said. ‘In the canteen? Human being to human being?’

They drank weak, stewed tea. Tracy had picked up a large Kit Kat while Linda chose a sour-looking apple. Tea and apples didn’t go together, everyone knew that.

‘What’s going to happen to that poor kiddy now?’ Tracy asked, snapping her Kit Kat into four fingers and already lamenting their finish before she’d even begun eating them.

‘He’ll be discharged, eventually, and go to a foster home,’ Linda said, biting into her green apple. ‘There aren’t any relatives.’ Big horsey teeth, would have made a good herbivore.

‘What about his father?’ Tracy asked and Linda Pallister raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Isn’t one.’

‘Can I talk to someone about the kiddy?’ Tracy asked.

‘You are talking to someone,’ Linda said. ‘You’re talking to me.’

‘You know he witnessed his mother’s murder, don’t you?’ Chomp-chomp-chomp, mechanically eating her apple. ‘He told me his father killed his mother,’ Tracy persisted. ‘CID just dismissed it.’

‘He’s four years old,’ Linda said. ‘He doesn’t know what’s real and what’s a fairy tale. Kids lie, it’s just what they do.’ There was a pause while her – rather piggy – little eyes seemed to assess Tracy. ‘A man he thinks of as his father,’ she added, tapping a folder in front of her on the table. ‘Carol didn’t know who his father was.’

The manila folder had a label in one corner, the name ‘Carol Braithwaite’ typed on it.

‘She was already a client?’ Tracy asked, touching the folder. Linda slammed her hand down on it as if Tracy was about to prise it open with her eyes.

‘Miss Braithwaite was known to Social Services,’ she said primly.

‘What for?’

‘I can’t talk about individual clients.’ She stood up abruptly, clamping the manila folder to her chest.

‘You knew the kid was at risk?’ Tracy said, standing up as well, aware of how much taller than Linda Pallister she was. ‘Maybe if you’d visited you would have found Michael a bit sooner. Before he spent three weeks locked in a flat with his mother’s corpse.’

Tracy had a sudden flashback to Linda Pallister taking the boy off her in the flat to give to the ambulance men. She held him high on one hip so that he was facing over her shoulder and his eyes locked on to Tracy’s as he was being carried away. Tracy felt as if he had reached in and scooped something out of her soul. She shuddered at the memory.

‘I have a very heavy caseload,’ Linda Pallister said defensively. ‘Every case is assessed on its individual merits. And now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.’

‘Look,’Tracy said, taking out a Biro, ‘let me write down my phone number.’ She prised the folder from Linda Pallister’s grip and said, ‘Not going to look inside, honestly.’ She wrote ‘WPC Tracy Waterhouse’ on Carol Braithwaite’s file and her home phone number.

‘This is my phone number,’ Tracy said. ‘If you ring, my mum will probably answer, but just talk her down. OK?’ She added the date to make it seem more official. ‘Just, you know, to keep in touch.’

‘Keep in touch?’

‘About the kiddy. About Michael.’

‘I have to go,’ Linda said, snatching the manila folder back, her face as sour as her apple core.

‘Yeah, I know, heavy caseload,’ Tracy said.

After Linda left, Tracy returned to the children’s ward. Michael was still asleep but she sat by his bed and watched him until a doctor came round, a simpering, silent nurse by his side. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked, seeing Tracy’s uniform – she was due on shift in half an hour.

‘No, I just wondered how he was.’

‘You’re one of the people who found him?’ Tracy didn’t think of herself and Arkwright as people, she thought of them as police.

‘Yes,’ Tracy said. ‘Me and my partner.’

The nurse took the boy’s pulse, cast a dismissive glance in Tracy’s direction. Wrote something on the boy’s chart. ‘Thank you, Margaret,’ the doctor said. Well, that was a first, Tracy thought, a doctor thanking a nurse. First-name terms, a medical romance perhaps. Tracy’s mother, on the afternoons that she didn’t go to her bridge club, put her feet up on the sofa and read Mills and Boon novels.

‘Ian Winfield,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m the consultant paediatrician on the ward.’ Tracy thought he was going to shake her hand and have a chat about Michael’s condition but instead he said, ‘The boy’s doing fine, but he needs to rest now. It’s probably best if you leave.’ Dismissed. Tracy couldn’t see what harm there was in just sitting there. The nurse looked at her, ready for trouble.

As Tracy was leaving the hospital she caught sight of Linda Pallister again. So much for her heavy caseload. She was coming out of the Cemetery Tavern, deep in argument with Ray Strickland. The odd couple. He got hold of her by the elbow and pulled her close, said something angrily to her. She looked terrified. Then Ray let her go and she walked unsteadily off. No bike, Tracy noticed.

‘I went to the hospital yesterday, to see the kiddy,’ Tracy said to Ken Arkwright, over a pint of Tetley’s bitter.

‘How was he?’

‘Asleep. I bumped into that social worker. Linda Pallister.’ Ken Arkwright grunted.

‘Anything happening? Anyone being questioned?’

‘You’ve got to remember,’ Arkwright said, ‘that the police don’t have the resources for law enforcement, for old-fashioned policing. Best we can do is clean up after people’s mess.’ He ripped open a packet of salt and vinegar crisps as if it was a trial of strength and offered one to Tracy. She hesitated, as befitted a girl on a cottage cheese and grapefruit diet. The chip-shop smell of the salt and vinegar crisps made her nose twitch.