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coffee in his hand.
    Elder shook his head and tipped it out over the ground.
    ‘You didn’t ask Donald about Susan Blacklock,’ she said once they were back inside.
    ‘All in good time.’
    In the Gents, Elder scrubbed his hands with almost exaggerated care.
    ♦
    He pushed it all he could. The path between Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay. The end of August. You were up there, that way. The North York coast. That time. Susan, remember? He showed Donald photographs, watching him closely for some tell-tale sign of recognition, realising the possibility that he had never known her name. Sometimes he would begin the session with it, at others wait and slip back to it amongst other things. And never succeeded in shaking him once. Shane Donald who was so shaky on so many things.
    Even then, Elder couldn’t shift it from his mind. The coincidence. The chance. The almost certainty gnawing at his insides. He had never been able to let it go.
    When he showed McKeirnan the photograph, all McKeirnan did was leer.
    ‘You know her, Alan?’
    ‘Like to.’ With a wink.
    ‘Where is she, Alan? What happened to her?’
    McKeirnan’s eyes glazed over and, just beneath his breath, he went back to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, ‘Shakin’ All Over’.
    Elder bit his lip and moved on.
    Be thankful for what you’ve got.
    Unless, like Helen and Trevor Blacklock, you had nothing. No daughter: empty rooms.

6
    He set out from Cornwall early, bag on the back seat, Thermos of coffee alongside him; unable to shake Susan Blacklock’s disappearance from his mind.
    At the first service station he filled up with petrol, checked the oil, pumped air into the tyres. It was a while since the car, an anonymous-looking Ford, had made such a run. In the garage shop he bought two bars of chocolate, orange juice, a roll of extra-strong mints. Calls of nature aside, he wasn’t planning too many stops.
    What he would do when he arrived he still wasn’t sure – poke around a bit, he supposed, maybe ask a few questions, jog a few minds, walk the ground.
    Outside Exeter the traffic picked up in volume. Elder flicked the radio through the usual permutations: Radios 2, 3 and 4, Classic FM. Mostly he preferred silence. Motorways and then narrow roads across the Yorkshire Wolds before the circumlocution of the A171, twisting between forest and moorland, the sea visible at intervals to the right-hand side. By the time the ruined outline of Whitby Abbey was in sight, the small of Elder’s back was aching, his legs felt cramped, his throat was dry. Slow past the inner harbour, then he parked the car, hefted his bag, and walked the short distance to the White Horse and Griffin, some fifty metres along the cobbles of Church Street.
    The room he’d booked ahead was in the eaves: clean sheets, a comfortable bed, an easy chair. Three nights or four, he wasn’t sure. A long slow bath and a change of clothes and, hungrier than he’d supposed, he ate an early meal downstairs, washing it down with a pint of beer. Almost as soon as his face touched the pillow, he was asleep. The sound of gulls, high-pitched and unyielding, woke him before five.
    ♦
    Susan Blacklock had been on holiday from Chesterfield with her parents, two weeks in a caravan at the Haven Holiday Park, high on the cliffs above Whitby, overlooking Saltwick Bay. An only child, at primary school she had seemed happy enough, well-behaved and conscientious; she had her fair share of party invitations, fairy cakes and special dresses, pass the parcel and musical chairs, magicians who made things disappear before your eyes. In the first few years at the comprehensive, however, she had been submerged, so anonymous that at parents’ evenings teachers had to be reminded who she was. But then, at fourteen, she had developed an interest in drama, a talent for acting previously unsuspected; as if when she stepped inside another character, took on a role, she found her voice. In palest blue with a large white bow, she