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those closest to him, would have known. Despair and fury had almost overwhelmed him, would have done probably had it not been for the children, who needed him more than ever. He couldn’t let them down. For more than three months, as the previous autumn declined into winter, he had withdrawn into himself, maintaining a pretence of engagement by swinging violently between the extremes of immersing himself in the children and working too hard.
    How long he would have stayed in his semi-vegetative state was anybody’s guess but he had been jolted back to reality by the offer of a transfer to head up West Sussex Major Crimes’ Squad, reporting directly to ACC Harper-Brown. It wasn’t exactly a promotion – his rank remained unchanged – but the previous incumbent had been a superintendent and it was clear from the way the opportunity was presented that promotion might follow if he did well.
    At first Fenwick had declined the opportunity, claiming that he couldn’t risk the impact on his family, but his old boss Superintendent Quinlan had refused to accept the decision. He’d dragged him away from the station to a pub in the backwoods of Sussex where they wouldn’t be recognised and proceeded to get the pair of them drunk. In his cups, Fenwick found it impossible to maintain his façade. Once he started talking it all came out. Quinlan had listened without interruption, suddenly sober and wise, an unsentimental man moved by what he heard.
    ‘You have to take this chance, Andrew. You’re in a rut and going deeper. And you’re too good to give in to this. I remember you when you first arrived in Harlden. You were so ambitious you didn’t care that it showed. You were also bloody good, the best detective I’ve ever worked with. But there comes a point in a career when being good at solving cases isn’t enough; even I know that though I despise half the management gobbledy-gook we have thrust on us.’
    ‘But the ambition’s gone; I told you, I’m no bloody good anymore. I’m just a faç…faça…a show.’
    ‘You still want to win; I see it in you every day. You care about justice and you’re the most tenacious person I’ve ever known. Look at what you did with the Smith case.’
    Quinlan was referring to his arrest of a serial killer the previous year. It had earned him a commendation. ‘Your instinct is uncanny. I know you resent the word intuition but that’s what it amounts to, like it or not.’
    Fenwick had been too drunk to argue. Deep down he knew that he possessed a rare skill that was as elusive as it was valuable. His mind had a way of sucking in apparently useless pieces of information and then allowing them to fester and combine randomly in his subconscious until, seemingly from nowhere, an idea came to him that would push an investigation on with a lurch in an apparently random direction. The thoughts that came to him were fragile. If he concentrated on them too hard or too soon, they vanished. So, over the years he had become superstitious about sharing his thinking with others, preferring instead to cogitate in private. When finally the ideas solidified, they weren’t always coherent, sometimes just a feeling or else the lingering cobweb of a dream on awakening, but he’d learnt to persist in coaxing them out no matter how elusive.
    Recalling the conversation as he delayed his return to his new responsibilities at MCS he hoped that Quinlan had been right and that he did have the personal resources to do this job. He would need every skill he possessed to find the killer of the boy in the grave on the hill. With a case this cold it would take more than luck and good police work to produce a result.
    A male pheasant rose up in front of him, squawking and clacking in alarm as if it had been beaten out of cover into a line of guns, but there was over a month yet before it would have to run that gauntlet. After the bird flapped heavily through the trees, the woods settled quieter. Still pines,