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after all those years, the old man’s eyes filled with tears. ‘A crying shame, it were,’ he said.
    ‘I read the inquest report,’ Laura said. ‘But the boy? He must have been devastated.’
    ‘He got sent off to boarding school as soon as he were old enough – if you think eight’s old enough. His father never had much time for him, and after that he were more interested in burying himself in his political work than looking after his lad. By the time the boy were fourteen or so, the old man were dead any road. Left the lad a small fortune, but there’d been little love lost. When he came home for t’holidays he used to mooch around the house and garden on his own most o’t’ time. Came chattering to us working in t’garden, as if we had time to listen. Never brought friends back and he had no friends local, like. Not so far as I could see, any road. A lonely lad in a lonely, sad house. Like his mother were a lonely wife. I don’t think old Murgatroyd meant any harm. He never saw it coming with his wife, that’s for sure, but other folk did.’
    Laura drove back to Bradfield slowly and headed straight home. She was not sure that Michael Thackeray would keep his promise to come back early, but she planned a meal which would survive until he eventually arrived. Then, she thought apprehensively, they really must talk. Soon it would become obvious that the worry that had oppressed her for the last few weeks had become a certainty, and she had absolutely no confidence that he would greet the news that he might be about to become a father again with anything other than horror. And with the tragic story of David Murgatroyd’s loss of his wife and baby daughter fresh in her mind, Laura was only too aware of why that might be so.

CHAPTER THREE
    DS Kevin Mower had no doubt about the mood his boss was in when he went into his office the next morning. Difficult would have been the most charitable adjective he could ever conjure up for Thackeray after all the years he had worked for him, which did not mean that Mower did not have respect and even affection for the older man, but these were feelings he had learnt to keep to himself. And this morning the atmosphere resembled one of those days when a threatening sky seems to press down on the world and lightning can be seen flickering on the horizon.
    ‘Guv,’ he said tentatively, closing the door behind him. ‘You’ve seen the reports on this missing woman?’
    ‘Why wasn’t I told about this yesterday?’ Thackeray said. ‘It seems to have been obvious enough to the young copper who interviewed the husband that something serious was up.’
    ‘Well, she told her sergeant that, but he didn’t agree, played it down, so it didn’t go in her written report. There was absolutely no evidence that Karen Bastable hadn’t left home of her own free will. They filed a misper report and circulatedthe car number. When I spoke to him he was still a bit dismissive of PC Mirza’s worries. She told him Bastable was a racist bastard and he’s obviously got up her nose. That may be why he discounted her concerns.’
    ‘Do you know PC Mirza?’ Thackeray asked.
    ‘I’ve met her actually,’ Mower said. ‘She was with “Omar” Sharif at a race relations course at HQ a couple of months ago.’
    ‘And…?’
    ‘She seemed a sharp cookie,’ Mower conceded. ‘Sharif seemed to rate her too. Reckoned she’d do well.’
    ‘Right. So talk to her before you go and see Bastable. Get her take on the situation. If this woman’s car’s been found ten miles from home and a couple of miles into Bently Forest, which is not exactly a spot you’d go for a picnic at this time of year, it casts a whole new light on her disappearance. And if I’ve got to persuade Jack Longley to start a major search in that sort of terrain, I’m going to need all the facts at my disposal. What time did the forestry workers report this?’
    ‘The message came in at about 8.30 this morning from their