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kid, of poor parents?”
    â€œMost likely.”
    â€œWho never reported her missing. That’s what I can’t grasp.”
    Charlie shook his head in agreement.
    â€œNo. It’s baffling. Neither thing ties in with the sort of location she was found in. Houghton Avenue, and those stone houses, were and are eminently respectable. The people there wouldn’t clothe their children off market stalls, and they would be on to the police the moment they went missing. If for no other reason than that the neighbors would be outraged if they didn’t. If it was as long ago as we think, the codes of respectability would be very much operative in a street like that.”
    Matt was taking his time to think this through.
    â€œSo what do we have? May be a swimsuit or a pair of pants on the body?”
    â€œThat sort of thing, they thought. And may be a jersey, or a shawl, or perhaps a blanket to lie on, like we said.”
    â€œSo presumably it was a summer crime, when the tot was running around without much on. A hot summer?”
    â€œCould be.”
    â€œChildren grow out of their clothes quickly.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œAnd there would be a quick turnover of goods in any street-market sort of enterprise.”
    â€œYour mind’s working along the same lines as ours,” confessed Charlie, as if he didn’t quite like a member of the public successfully playing at being detective. “It would be at the time this cotton was being imported in the form of cheap clothes. They wouldn’t sit around in a warehouse for years and years. So any summer in the late sixties or early seventies.”
    â€œWhen was the hot one?”
    â€œThe hottest was the summer of sixty-nine.”
    â€œThe summer of sixty-nine,” repeated Matt softly, his face rapt in thought.
    Charlie shot him a quick glance, but it was some seconds before he took in the implications of what he saw.
    â€œYou’ve been here before, haven’t you? You knew those houses in the past.”
    Matt shook himself.
    â€œYes. The summer of sixty-nine. I’ve been meaning to tell you before.”
    â€œTell me now.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Summer
of Sixty-Nine

It all seemed very strange to the little boy of seven. Not the house: his own home back in Bermondsey was not so very different, though this one was rather bigger—a late-Victorian terrace house with two bedrooms on the first floor and two more in the attic. He and his brother and sisters would have killed for so much space. Usually this one just housed his auntie Hettie. But it was the open spaces around the house that fascinated him: the fields gone to scrub, the little gill as his aunt called it, with the stream beside it, leading up the hill toward the main road, and Armley. He had the ambition to go beyond that: he knew there was a Catholic church and school and even an orphanage (the mere name fascinated him, and he thought it would be something like Oliver!, which his parents had taken him to see at Christmas). Those buildings were beyond the hilltop, which he had so far only seen from below, and he would go and see them soon. Definitely.
    â€œEat up, Young Matt,” his auntie Hettie would say as he sat at breakfast. “There’s a squirrel out there as wants to have a word with you.”
    She knew he was fascinated by the wildlife, how it could exist in the midst of a big city. She called him Young Matt to distinguish him from his father, who was also Matt. But whereas his father had been christened by an evangelically inclined mother after the author of the first Gospel, Young Matt had been named after Matt Busby, the Manchester United football manager. Aunt Hettie did not need to distinguish between them in this way because his father hadn’t come north with him. He was back in London with Young Matt’s mother, who had had a hysterectomy, with ensuing complications.
    Aunt Hettie had married a soldier