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and starts across the meadow, towards the west end of the village. The sun is beginning to set, and she casts
     a long shadow
.

Chapter Six
    Stan’s already rolled a cigarette while the press conference was wrapping up, and lights it as they step into the car park.
     ‘Good God,’ he says. ‘What sort of morons put on a lunchtime bloody press conference and don’t even lay on any bloody sandwiches?
     You’ve got to do sandwiches if you want a good write-up. Everybody knows journalists need sandwiches. I could have been in
     the pub.’
    Stan is old-school. Very old-school. He comes from the days when journalism was largely conducted in bars, and somehow he
     continues to live his life as though those days still existed. By modern Fleet Street standards he is a dinosaur, still doing
     his research by telephone and attendance rather than news feeds and a couple of hits on Google. But he sucks you in when you
     see him and reminds you what attracted you to the job in the first place.
    He plonks himself on a wall that holds in a bunch of evergreens and a collection of discarded fag butts and soft-drinks cans.
     Kirsty grins and settles down next to him.
    ‘Yeah. That was pretty much a waste of time, wasn’t it?’
    A rich Guinness growl emerges from his throat. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘at least it got me away from Sleaford.’
    ‘You’ve been up in Sleaford?’
    ‘Yes. Even the name sounds like something you find on your shoe, doesn’t it? I had to volunteer to cover this just to get
     out ofthere. What I want to know is why they can’t start murdering people in places you’d actually want to go to. Seriously. How
     about the seaside, for a change? Just bloody selfish, I call it.’
    ‘Child F and Child M?’
    Stan nods. Another week, another outbreak of schoolchild violence: two twelve-year-olds bullying another till he jumped off
     a railway platform into the path of an oncoming train. The whole thing recorded on CCTV, so there was no doubt as to the identity
     of the guilty parties.
    ‘Of course,’ says Stan, ‘if they hadn’t got rid of the staff on that station, they wouldn’t have needed the CCTV and someone
     might’ve stopped it. Shit. What a world we live in. Price of everything, value of nothing. There seem to be bottomless funds
     for wheelie-bin Nazis, but God forbid you’d want to protect someone’s kids from a pair of bullying scumbags.’
    Her heart jolts. She’s always thought of Stan as relatively liberal. For a crime reporter.
    ‘Seriously?’ She says. ‘Bullying scumbags?’
    Stan sighs. ‘Yeah, I know. But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Poor little shits didn’t stand much chance of being anything
     else. The usual shower of useless parents, absent dads, third-generation doleys. I went and doorstepped Child F’s mum. Exactly
     what you’d expect. Still in bed at one o’clock and a bunch of kids doing wheelies on the pavement outside among the dumped
     fridges. And do you know what she said?’
    Kirsty shakes her head.
    Stan adopts a Universal Northern Accent. ‘“Nowt to do wi’ me,”’ he says. ‘“He’s out o’control, that one.”’
    ‘Yes, but …’ she begins timidly. She never knows how to argue this subject.
    ‘Yeah, I know,’ Stan sighs again. But it would be so nice if just occasionally people would try not acting up to their stereotypes,
     wouldn’t it? And at least F’s mum was honest. Know what the other one said?’
    His voice goes high and sappy as he imitates Child M’smother. ‘“I love my kids. I don’t care what he’s done, I love him anyway.”’
    Kirsty remembers her own mum, glimpsed on a TV screen before someone hurriedly switched it off: flower-patterned polyester
     tent-blouse, fresh-bought for court, and trousers straining around the apron of stomach lying on her thighs, her hair scraped
     greasily back off a defiant face. Same thing, same phrase exactly; and after that, silence. Not a visit, not a birthday card.
     Love and