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shouting orders. The
     photograph cannot capture bullets, but their presence is taken as read. These two people are taking cover from incoming fire.
     They are within inches of their lives. The picture silenced us. Was it a snapshot of an instant’s tenderness, representative
     in some way of a relationship between these two people? Or was it a photographic misrepresentation? Did the image imply a
     tenderness, a seeking cover, a protection, that was not, was never, there?
    We both knew it was Melanie for the simple reason that her name was printed underneath the picture. Otherwise the confusion
     of the scene, the obfuscation of her face, would have meant that she was unrecognizable.
    “So who’s Sergeant Mike Darling?” Sal asked after a few moments, peering at the blurb where Melanie’s protector was named.
    “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, “except that he’s now employed at HazPrep—or he has been, or at least that a man with
     the same name has been—and that he may or may not have been with Melanie that last day.”
    “Where was this taken?” Sal was frowning.
    I shrugged, then looked around me to check we were on our own before I removed the photograph carefully from the board. It
     was secured by pins, so the only damage was a little perforation. I turned it over, hoping for some identifying mark on the
     back. A location, a date, a photographer’s name, any of these would be helpful. There was handwriting, but all it gave was
     the name Sergeant Mike Darling, scrawled in pencil.
    I removed the slip of paper with the caption that identified Melanie and Mike Darling by name, and slipped it into my pocket
     along with the photograph. Sal rearranged the other photographs to cover the gap, placing a rather fine, brooding portrait
     of himself at the center of the board.
    I tried the publicity department, but as I’d half suspected, the woman who worked there said she had no record of a board
     or photographs in that particular location. She tried so hard to persuade me that I had been hallucinating that eventually
     I just gave up and walked out.
    At the picture archive, I handed the photograph to a young man whose name tag identified him as Henry and who had elegant
     wrists and long fingers. He held it under the light to take a good look, then flipped it over to take a look, as I had.
    “I can’t think where it’s come from off the top of my head,” he told me, “and without anything to go on, it’s going to be
     like the needle in the proverbial haystack.”
    He saw my pleading expression and rolled his eyes. “I’ll make a copy. Leave it with me,” he said, resigned. I thanked him,
     waited while he copied the photograph, and left my mobile number.
    “Did Melanie’s boyfriend ever get back to you?” I asked Sal when I returned to the office.
    A couple of years back, Sal had briefly pursued Melanie, apparently challenged by her icy reputation. I knew that had he managed
     once to bed her, he would have lost interest within a week. But she had not allowed him close. Ironically, her disappearance
     had aroused in Sal the sort of genuine affection and concern that had not been evident in his overlusty pursuit of her. Like
     me, Sal had been trying to put two and two together since Melanie disappeared.
    “He told me to get lost. And I quote, ‘I feel that in this case, the harsh light of journalistic scrutiny will only serve
     to blind us to the facts. This is a job for the men of the police force, not for the boys in the press corps.’”
    “You made that up.”
    “I did not. That’s what he said. Word for word.”
    “Then he sounds as pompous as you,” I told Sal.
    I had never met Melanie’s boyfriend, Fred Sevi. All I knew was that he was a professor of psychiatry at King’s College, that
     they had known each other for two years and been together for slightly less than that when she disappeared, and that for a
     long time after she vanished, the police had had him in their