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originally attracted Sandra. Jim hadn’t spoken much, then or since, but there was no doubt that he was an indefatigable searcher; he’d been out all night on Monday and Tuesday, despite the snow that fell in the early hours of Tuesday. He had more stamina than thin Reg Webster – he would probably search all Wednesday night too. Was he also violent, this strong untiring man? But Edna Webster had intimated that Sandra was the strict one. Edgar remembered her saying, that first night, ‘I wanted to give Annie a good hiding.’ He’d dismissed it then but maybe he was wrong to do so.
    Sandra was definitely not forthcoming today. She had the baby on her hip and responded to Edgar’s questions mechanically. Annie was a good girl and always helped in the house. She was good with the little ones, always telling them stories and suchlike. No, not really motherly, more . . . well, more like a little teacher really. Yes, she was good at school. Passed her eleven-plus, always kept up with her homework. She was close to her grandma and granddad. She liked going to their house. Granddad had been a teacher so they got on really well, talking about books and that. She did think of being a teacher herself once but she met Jim and well, that was that. Uncle Brian? She’d met him a couple of times but she didn’t think that Annie was especially close to him. All the children knew him. He was just that sort of man. What sort of man was that? Oh, you know, didn’t have children himself but liked to see them around. Kind, that’s what he was.
    Edgar left the house feeling that he had learnt nothing new. Annie was a clever girl, obviously more at home in the neat Hove flat than in the crowded terraced house in Freshfield Road. But she helped with her little brothers and sister, did her homework and generally got on with things. She gravitated towards people like her grandfather and Brian Baxter, adults who had time for her. If she had any worries, she probably told them to Mark, who, as his mother put it, knew how to keep a secret.
    At the bottom of the hill he met the jeep and was happy to hitch a lift. It was only four o’clock but already growing dark. The driver, a bald man with sergeant stripes, greeted him with, ‘What do you reckon then? We’ve looked all round the park and up by the racecourse. They’re not anywhere round here. You think someone’s kidnapped them?’
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    The big man shrugged. ‘It’s what people are saying, isn’t it?’
    ‘Is it?’ Edgar made a mental note to talk to the PCs who’d been in the search party. It was the first time that he’d heard anyone mention kidnapping.
    ‘Who’d do something like that to a kiddie?’ said the sergeant. ‘They must be sick in their heads.’
    Edgar said nothing. He felt chilled to the bone and not just from the cold. Either the children were dead from exposure or they were in the hands of someone ‘sick in their head’. In a few hours’ time, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, he was sure he’d have to go into Edna Webster’s house with Mark grinning gap-toothed from the mantelpiece and tell her that her son was dead.
    The roads around the hospital were clear but Kemp Town was a no-go zone, the narrow streets clogged with snow and stationary vehicles. The jeep bumped its way down to the coast road.
    ‘I can walk from here,’ said Edgar. ‘You get back to the barracks. You’ve been really helpful. Thank you.’
    The sergeant gave him a salute that was only half ironical. Edgar forgot to salute back. The army seemed a lifetime away.
    He set off, keeping the railings on his left. He couldn’t see the sea but he knew it was there, whispering against the shingle. In Norway, the sea itself had frozen, fossilised into great stone waves. At least it wasn’t that cold. One day he might even feel his feet again.
    The coast road was deserted, the Christmas lights between the lampposts casting little pools of coloured light, blue, green