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through the pub brawls and the murders. The barmaid in a place a few hundred metres away, stabbed to death eight years ago by the customer who waited until the place emptied so he could be alone with his victim. A fight that ended with an eighteen-year-old having his face slashed a few metres further down the road. A takeaway next door to that, busted one day nineteen months ago for serving not just kebabs but also crack cocaine and ketamine.
    It is Caffery’s job to ferret out the secrets hidden under the veneer. His unit – MCIT – is the one that gets all the murders and difficult cases. The cases that need high-level attention. Like the one that’s making Jacqui so angry.
    The toilet flushes and she comes out again. She ignores the drink and throws herself on to the bed, face down.
    ‘You OK?’
    She nods into the pillow. ‘I took a sleeping pill.’
    ‘Is that a good idea?’
    ‘It’s the only idea.’
    Caffery checks his watch. It means he’s going to have to wait with her – make sure she doesn’t throw up and choke herself. Or go into a coma. He glances around the room. There’s a plush brown sofa with gold scatter cushions he can rest on. He draws the quilt over Jacqui then goes into the bathroom. Puts the plug in the basin and turns the taps on. While the sink fills he hunts through the various pill packets she has scattered around. There are no prescription drugs, just over-the-counter things – stomach-acid tablets and paracetamol and some slimming aids. Also a packet of Nytol, which he opens. One has been removed from the blister pack. He checks the bin and there are no empty pill packets. She hasn’t overdosed then.
    He hunts through all the designer toiletries – finds a shower gel which he squirts into the sink until he can make a lather. Then he pulls off his shirt and drops it in the sink. He rubs the soap into it, scrubbing at the collar where the wine has soaked in. He rinses it, then hangs it over the huge rain-shower head.
    He goes back into the bedroom, drying his hands on a towel. Jacqui is exactly where he left her, on her front, her arms wide apart, her face turned to one side. He stands alongside her, head tilted, waiting and listening. Her eyes are closed and there’s already a faint snoring noise.
    He sits on a low animal-hide chair and surveys the room. There’s a TV but he’d wake her up. A couple of magazines. He leafs through them – nothing much to see. An article about a designer hotel on the outskirts of Bristol that holds his attention for a moment, because he was at the same hotel this lunchtime – attending the killer-boring Criminal Justice Forum. He recognizes the downlit beaten-copper sinks in the gents, the sweeping poured-concrete reception desk. He spent a few minutes at that reception desk, with a pretty, very professional woman – a blonde, who had some top-drawer position in a local health trust – talking shop, all the while his primitive brain conjecturing in a vague, theoretical way whether or not he could get her into bed. She was the only interesting thing about the event. Otherwise it was eminently forgettable.
    He tries to read a little longer, but can’t concentrate. He drops the magazine and looks around the room again. There is a lavish hand-tied bunch of flowers shoved into an ice bucket on the drinks table. Caffery gets up, goes to the flowers, and reads the card. It’s from the newspaper Jacqui is supposed to be giving an interview to. Misty, her twenty-five-year-old model daughter, walked out of a rehab clinic on the Wiltshire border a year and a half ago. She was a drug addict and having relationship problems with her footballer boyfriend, but neither of those things was sufficient to explain why she was never seen again. Every avenue has been searched over and over – and there are still no clues. She was simply there one day, not the next. Thousands of people go missing each year and if they’re ordinary, adult and competent, the police