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direction?”
    â€œTakes you to the crossroads, then straight over would be toward Briarstone. The other way would be out toward Baysbury.”
    â€œAny ANPR cameras on that road?”
    â€œAfraid not.”
    â€œToo much to hope for, I guess.”
    â€œIt’s really quiet, that area. I’ve been looking at the crime data—hardly anything goes on down there. Most of the traffic seems to be related to the farm.”
    â€œI need to get a nice map,” Lou said absently, wondering whether the analyst had gone home already.
    21:04
    Drifting in and out of consciousness was at times a delicious and a devastating thing, Brian thought. You saw faces, not knowing if they were real or imagined, a thought came and then it was gone, voices came and went . . .
    â€œHave we located any next of kin?”
    â€œPolice found a daughter, we are waiting for more from them.”
    Music . . . light and dark . . . pain . . .
    Taryn. Where was Taryn? Suzanne . . . Polly . . . ?
    And darkness.
    21:05
    Andy Hamilton pulled out of the hospital car park and headed through the rain toward home, wondering if there was any chance Karen would have cooked something for him, or if he should stop and get a kebab. He could have phoned her, of course, but that would risk waking Leah, who might, with a bit of luck, have gone off to sleep. He’d sent a text an hour ago, letting Karen know that he was going to be a bit late. No reply had been forthcoming.
    In the end his car seemed to pull in of its own accord to the parade of shops where the Attila Kebab House and Pizzeria’s bright lights beckoned, and a few minutes later he was back in the car, a steaming polystyrene carton warming his thighs. He picked at bits of grilled chicken, wiping them in the chili sauce that dribbled out of the edges of the pita, thinking about Detective Chief Inspector Louisa Smith.
    It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her since it happened, but it was the first time they’d worked together. Was it awkward? Not for him. She was looking even better these days, or was it this new brisk air of authority about her that made her even more of an exciting challenge?
    I’d go there again, he thought.
    Outside the off-license a little crowd of the usual halfwits had gathered, and he kept a contemplative eye on them while he crammed the pita in. They were here all the time. Patrols got bored with coming out here night after night, sending them on their way, getting all the verbal abuse that went with it, only to be called out again by the shopkeeper an hour later because they were back, throwing stones and beer cans around and shouting obscenities. It was putting off her regular customers, Mrs. Kumar complained. It was bad for business.
    Neighborhood was supposed to be putting together a dispersal zone. In the meantime, the local arseholes sat on Mrs. Kumar’s storage unit, spat great gobs of phlegm at the pavement, and shouted incomprehensible twaddle at each other and at passersby.
    If they did something really bad, he’d have to get out of the car, kebab or no kebab.
    He watched one of them, a skinny lad with a shaved head, wearing a vest—a vest , for crying out loud, it was November—push one of the girls on the shoulder, hard enough to knock her off her perch on the metal barrier. She kept to her feet but immediately turned to square up to him, her fist brought back behind her ear.
    â€œOh, no,” Andy groaned, “don’t be a muppet.”
    The skinhead in the vest, one of the Petrie family, judging by the extensive monobrow and weaselly chin, was laughing at the girl, pointing. Her mate, squeezed into too-tight white jeans with some appropriate word sequinned across the arse, shouted back at him, wobbled her head and waved her hands, ghetto style, and for some reason, that seemed to be more of a legitimate challenge because the halfwit backed off then, hands up in