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were provoking me!’) and keeping in touch with anyone you liked or loved becomes not worth theeffort. Your friends begin to take the hint, and drop away. Your family try to tell you a few home truths about your choice of partner, and that’s more grist to the bully’s mill. (‘See? They’ve had a down on me right from the start!’) And soon your world is him, and only him. And after that you gradually begin to see the whole boiling around you through his eyes because you’re so run down, and on your own, and standing up for yourself is so much harder than not arguing back. And if that makes you just a bag of worthless shite, because he tells you so, then you believe it. Add a few hard thumps and beatings, and it can take no time at all to turn an upright cheerful person into the sort of snivelling muppet that we police officers bail out time and again.
    So best of luck to Mrs Bryce Harris, or whoever she was, with her long hospital sleep. Better off out of it, since all the woman has to wake to now is a child taken into care and one big mess.
    But it was up to me to find out all the details. So while we had Bryce Harris under lock and key on suspicion of grievous bodily harm, I went back to the flat. One of our locks was on the damaged door to keep the neighbours out. In I went, hammering open windows as I walked through because of the stink. I was quite glad to see the dog was gone. I reckoned I owed someone from the council offices a pint for that. Now it was my job to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything that might give rise to tracking down the past.
    I was allowed to shift things about. They’d already taken all the photographs that one or two of those buffoons in Social Services might need to see a second time if they went all soft-headed, and talked of sending the child ‘home’. I would have thought the bruises on the mother’s legs would be enough. But Martha had photographed all around the flat as well. (‘Got some quite arty ones of all that dog poo.’)
    I spent an hour or so opening drawers. Anything that was useless – the special offers, packs of cards, catalogues, porn – I threw in a pile on the floor. I kept the bills because you can track down a host of aliases and previous addresses from some of those. Crushed in a drawer were several anonymous letters about the noise the dog made all the time, and one warning Harris that if he didn’t cough up what he owed, he’d get a visitor he didn’t want. That too was left unsigned. The place was knee-deep in receipts, some three or four years old. Fags, beer and groceries mainly. I must say, that surprised me. I would have had Bryce Harris down for the sort that lets the receipts for anything he hasn’t shoplifted drop in the street because he can’t be arsed to stuff them in his pockets.
    Then I went through the big cupboard in the bedroom, tossing the bottles behind me onto the bed so I could get right to the back. Christ, there were some horrors in there, but I pressed on. I found a discount card to some toddlers’ soft playcentre called Hurlabout.(Result! Name of child: Edward Taylor.) I found a hairdresser’s card tucked in a tampon box. A Cut Above. The salon’s address was in Sunderland. No time or date, but we were definitely getting somewhere. I found a first birthday card from somebody who’d signed herself Nana, but with so doddery a hand I reckoned she was probably out of it by now, all these years later. A postmark might usefully have pinned down Eddie’s year of birth, but the envelope was gone.
    Then, at the back, I found the tidy little tower of unmarked tapes, with an old shirt draped over. I counted eleven of them, and hauled them out because I hoped we might get Harris for distributing porn – though it was most unlikely that any charge would stick, videotapes dating back almost to the days when showing a little bit of you-know-what was seen as daring. Most of the people in these blocks are