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Whoever did this, however it was done, it was wicked. You can’t always slice that into degrees.’
    A photo cube on Fran’s desk was filled with Polaroids of her and her brothers. She came from a big family: seven brothers; Fran was the only girl. The boys doted on their little sister, the police pathologist.
    ‘You’re ruling out poison?’ Marnie said. ‘And smothering?’
    ‘Smothering, yes, unless the post-mortem throws up any surprises, but plenty of poisons are hard to trace after even a day or two. We’re talking four or five years, maybe a bit longer than that. I can’t rule it out. In any case,’ Fran picked crumbs from the desk, one by one, dropping each crumb into the plastic bin at her side, ‘our boys wouldn’t have needed a serious dose of anything dangerous. Too much Night Nurse would’ve done the trick, sent them to sleep with no chance of waking up, given how weak and malnourished they were.’
    She cleaned the ends of her fingers with a tissue. ‘I can’t be sure, but I think . . . I hope  . . . it would have been a quiet death.’
    A quiet death.
    Marnie didn’t believe that. She could see and taste and hear the noise of their dying, alone and scared. Her ears rang with outrage at the noise. ‘So I’m looking for brothers who went missing up to five years ago. Any other clues to where they might’ve come from?’
    ‘Not yet. The clothes and the torch batteries were from Asda; hundreds of those all over the country. The books were UK editions, in English. The jigsaw was printed in China. The tins of food are odd . . .’ Fran pulled a notepad towards her. ‘Peaches and sweetcorn, but not a brand I’ve seen on sale in any supermarket where I shop. There might be something in that.’
    Marnie made a note. ‘British?’
    ‘The boys? Not necessarily. We might need bone chemistry to narrow it down.’
    ‘I’ll look at the labels from the tins, see what we can turn up.’
    Fran held a mug of tea between her hands. Long hands, their bony fingers delicately strung. Gentle hands. She’d be careful with the boys.
    ‘I’m guessing there’s nothing from Missing Persons yet,’ she said.
    ‘Not yet. Soon, I hope, especially now you’ve given us something to work with.’
    Someone had been missing two small boys for four years, maybe longer.
    It was time to take them home.

9
    Noah was queuing in the local café for the team’s coffee order. He’d wanted the fresh air; his clothes smelt of the Doyles’ garden. The team was twitchy because they had a cold case on their hands. Decent coffee would help.
    ‘No. No, that’s enough. Put that down.’ At a table by the window, a man was struggling to placate a shrieking child, without conspicuous success.
    ‘Can I help you?’ It was Noah’s turn at the counter.
    ‘Thanks. Two lattes, one with an extra shot, one skinny, three Americanos and two flat whites.’
    The father–son tableau reminded Noah of his brother’s childhood tantrums. Sol was in his twenties now, had long since worked out how to get what he wanted in more devious if sometimes still noisy ways. Back when Noah was ten and his little brother was four, Sol had thrown tantrums on a daily basis, making the whole house spin around him.
    In the café, the boy’s mother reappeared, quelling the child with a look and a handful of words that Noah didn’t catch. Her husband sat with his shoulders curled in defeat. Every so often he risked a glance at his son, as if trying to work out where the fury had come from, or distrustingthe quiet, waiting for the next outburst. Noah’s father, Dylan, hadn’t put up with tantrums from either of his sons, but he had worked long hours, and late. Whenever he was out, Sol would start on their mother, Rosa, who responded by taking his temperature, feeding him pink medicine, baby stuff, unlikely to do any harm but unnecessary all the same. The fact that Sol never had a tantrum in front of their father told Noah, at the age of ten, that