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appointed, and then made no further progress up the ladder. It was a record I was proud of. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mr Dewhurst going into the toilets.
    ‘Excuse me,’ called the producer. ‘We’ll begin if you’re all ready. You first, Superintendent. Quiet, please.’
    ‘You’re on,’ I said to Gilbert, adding: ‘You won’t mind if I go to wave Willy at the wall, will you?’
    In the gents’, Dewhurst was standing at the wash-basins, running water into one of them. He looked up as I entered and we exchanged polite but grim nods. He left as I was having my pee. I washed my hands in the sink next to the one he’d used and followed him out.
    There was another delay for some reason. Mrs Eaglin was standing with Dewhurst, giving him support before his ordeal by television. He had the worst part of all. Eventually they were ready and the producer called for Gilbert again. As he was leaving me I told him: ‘Your hair’s sticking up at the back, Gilbert.’
    He gave it a perfunctory wipe with his hand.
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s still sticking up. You ought to comb it.’
    ‘Bloody hell, Charlie!’ he hissed at me. ‘It’s not a frigging game show. What’s got into you?’
    Gilbert had one minute to tell the story so far;then Dewhurst did his bit. It was harrowing. He broke down and wept and couldn’t finish off what he wanted to say. Nearly everybody in the room was crying with him, some openly, some internally. Then I had to go on and tell people where to come with their information. I don’t envy newsreaders: I felt shagged-out when it was over.
    The film was shown locally on the lunchtime news, and broadcast nationally in the evening. The response was phenomenal. We imported extra staff to man the computers. Over the next three weeks every single lead was followed, and every one of them took us up a dead end. Georgina Dewhurst had vanished from the face of the globe as effectively as if she had never existed.
     
    We checked over three hundred alibis and made thirty-one arrests. Of these, only two reached the ‘helping us with our enquiries’ stage. ‘Georgina – Man Detained’ screamed the headlines in the tabloids. We were only going through the motions, though. The first was Billy Sunshine. Billy stands just outside the bus station most days, rocking gently backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet. He usually has a bottle sticking out of his jacket pocket and a big smile for everyone who passes by. There had been one report of a little girl being seen hand-in-hand with a man heading away from the area. A scruffy man – it could have beenBilly. He’d been shown the photo on the Tuesday morning and said he recognised her. We kept him in overnight and gave him breakfast. He had a better alibi than Nixon when Kennedy was shot, so we handed him over to the detox centre.
    The other one was more like it. It wasn’t as a result of fine detective work – someone wrote us an anonymous letter. Terry Finnister lived in Workington, but had delivered a lorryload of bathroom equipment to a company in Heckley early that Monday morning. And, the letter-writer kindly advised us, he was a convicted sex offender. They went on to give us some advice on how to treat his sort. I took Nigel to Workington to have a word with him, and we brought him back to Heckley.
    It was a mess. When he’d been a teenager his mother had remarried. Her new husband had a young son. Finnister served five years for buggering the child while baby-sitting. During the interview he told us that his stepfather had raped him, and that his mother had died of an overdose while he was in jail. At the time of Georgina’s disappearance he’d been off-loading two dozen avocado, low-level, easy-flush toilet pedestals, and he had the invoices to prove it; plus a receipt for his breakfast, eaten shortly afterwards. We asked the local SOCO to give the cab of his lorry a going-over, but we lacked enthusiasm.
    * * *
    The Reverend Gerry