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room. The wall above it was covered in pictures: everything from still life to street scenes and landscapes. Pictures of bicycles, cars, a woman hanging out washing on a line, two men loading or unloading a removals van. There were close-ups of small children, of a young couple holding hands, and the faces of old people with wrinkled necks and weathered hands.
    And every one was in black and white.
    Lying on the seat of a wooden chair beside the bed was a large photograph album. Paget picked it up and opened it. It was filled with pictures of Trudy Mason. Dramatic head-and-shoulders shots for the first few pages, but they became more and more revealing as Paget turned the pages.
    â€˜Good body for her age,’ Molly observed archly, peering over Paget’s shoulder. ‘And very nicely posed. Quite tasteful, really, don’t you think, sir?’
    â€˜Quite,’ he said, closing the book.
    A chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a large bookcase crammed with magazines took up much of the wall opposite the window. Paget pulled out magazines at random. Every one of them concerned photography in one form or another. He looked around the room. It appeared that Billy Travis had been passionate about only two things in life: photography and Trudy Mason, possibly in that order. So what had he done to deserve such a death? Perhaps the answer was in the laptop on a shelf above the desk beside the window.
    â€˜That’s odd,’ said Molly, who had been cruising the room. ‘Have you noticed, sir? There are no family pictures. None at all. You’d think with father and son both being photographers, there would be some family photos among this lot.’
    Paget pulled the laptop off the shelf. ‘That is a bit odd,’ he agreed absently. ‘Perhaps this will tell us something more about the man.’
    Molly bent to peer under the bed, then got down on her knees and pulled out a small suitcase. It was covered in dust. Clearly it had not been opened for a very long time. She expected it to be locked, but the latches sprang open as soon as she pressed them.
    Inside were photographs, scores if not hundreds of them, all of the family, but most of them of Billy himself. Billy as a baby; Billy as a toddler with his mother; Billy on a tricycle; Billy on his birthday. His mother was in most of them, so it was a reasonable assumption that his father had taken the pictures. Molly shuffled through them and found a cheeky one of Billy as a boy. He was grinning broadly as he pointed to what must have been a recent ‘buzz cut’. He looked awful, but he must have changed his mind – or he’d had it changed for him – because Molly found another picture of him with a full head of hair, and looking positively angelic as a choir boy, taken a year or so later.
    Molly had been passing the pictures to Paget as she sorted through them, but now Paget set them aside. ‘There are none of his mother after about the age of five,’ he said slowly. ‘PC Whitelaw said Billy’s mother died when he was young, and it doesn’t look as if any pictures were taken of the boy for several years after that. Have you seen any of him from about the time he was five to something like ten?’
    Molly shook her head. ‘You’re right,’ she said, shuffling through the pile. ‘It looks as if there were none taken for several years. Nor can I find any pictures of him from the time he was seventeen or eighteen. Not a single picture. I wonder why that was?’
    â€˜Perhaps his father can tell us,’ Paget said. ‘I’m taking the laptop with me, but you might as well put the case back under the bed for now. SOCO can go through it later.’
    â€˜Funny, but I never realized it had gone on that long,’ George Travis said bleakly when Paget asked him. ‘I suppose I fell out of the habit of taking pictures of the boy after his mother died. She was the one who was always after