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brass and police authorities that it’s cost-effective in these times of austerity all round. We’re trying to make the case that it’s a front-end expense that saves a lot of back-end costs. I thought Carol Jordan would be the perfect keynote speaker, given how closely she’s worked with you over the years. But I’m having some difficulty tracking her down. BMP tell me she’s no longer on their books. They informed me she was transferring to West Mercia. But they say she’s not on their strength. I tried the email address I had for her, but it bounced back at me. And the mobile number I had for her isn’t working any more. I wondered if maybe she was deep undercover, but either way I reckoned you’d know where I can get in touch with her.
Can you give me some contact details? Or if that’s not practical, can you at least ask her to get in touch with me?
Thanks in advance,
Rollo Harris,
Detective Chief Superintendent,
Devon & Cornwall Police
     
    Tony stared at the screen, the words blurring. Rollo Harris wasn’t the only one who didn’t know where Carol Jordan was, or how to get in touch with her. Most people who knew them both would have struggled to believe it, but Tony hadn’t spoken to Carol for the best part of three months. And he wouldn’t have known where to find her if he’d felt able to break that silence. The last thing she’d said to him after the hunt for Vance was done was, ‘It’s not all that’s over, Tony.’ And it appeared she’d meant it. She’d cut herself loose from his life.
    At first, he’d managed to keep track of her. Although her final weeks at Bradfield Metropolitan Police had been classified as compassionate leave, she was obliged to let her employers know where she was. And because Paula McIntyre knew better than most how close the bond between Carol and Tony had been, she’d kept him in the loop. Carol had rented a service apartment in Bradfield for a month, then she’d moved into her parents’ house.
    Then she stopped being a DCI with BMP and, according to Paula, within days she was no longer under her parents’ roof. ‘I called her mobile and it wasn’t working. So I rang her parents’ number and spoke to her dad. He wasn’t very forthcoming but he did admit she wasn’t living there any more. He either didn’t know or he wouldn’t say where she is,’ Paula had told him. Given the quality of Paula’s interrogation skills, Tony reckoned David Jordan probably didn’t know where his daughter was living.
    He couldn’t help wondering how that had happened. Going home to her parents, in the circumstances, wouldn’t have been his professional advice. Her brother was dead, murdered by a killer he and Carol had failed to catch soon enough. And grief generally imposed a need to distribute blame. Was it Carol’s guilt or her parents’ pain that had driven a wedge between them?
    However it had played out, it hadn’t ended well. Tony would have put money on that. And since Carol needed to hold him responsible for Michael and Lucy’s death because he had been too slow to realise what Vance had planned, then it followed that she would blame him for the rift with her parents. Insult to injury.
    Tony rubbed his eyes with a knuckle. Wherever Carol Jordan was hiding, he would be the last to know. Sooner or later he was going to have to man up and either do something about that or let it go for ever.

8
     
    G artonside was a district nobody had ever chosen to live in. Even when the narrow streets of basic brick terraces had been built back at the tail end of the nineteenth century, their original residents knew they were destined to be slums before the decade was out. Thin walls meant cold and damp were perennial problems. Cheap materials diminished privacy. Outside toilets and no bathrooms did nothing for the hygiene or health of the factory workers who filled the two-bedroom houses to bursting point. Gartonside became the cheerless port of call of the feckless, the