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time spent on them is embarrassingly little. But Misty was a celebrity of sorts; young, pretty. The media has kept the interest going long after police would normally have given up. Jacqui Kitson has been a regular face in the tabloids – pictures of Jacqui in the last place Misty was seen, on the sweeping white steps of the clinic, gazing pensively up at the building where her daughter spent her final days. Posing with a photo of Misty and a handkerchief clutched to her face. She dishes every insult about police incompetence she can muster.
    Each of her words is a knife in Caffery’s side. He is the Senior Investigating Officer tasked with finding Misty and the case has been haunting him for ages – it has been bounced back and forward between MCIT and the review team until Misty’s name has burned a hole through his head. But truth is stranger than fiction and the world is never what it seems: for over a year Caffery’s been hopscotching over the issue, he’s been guarding the case like a hound, appearing to be working on it while simultaneously leading the unit away from what he really knows about Misty’s disappearance – which is more, much more, than any cop has a right. It’s a big fat secret he’s been hiding. Something he can’t do anything about.
    He replaces the card gently amongst the gaudy blooms. Can’t? Or won’t? Or is he just not quite ready? There’s one more bridge to cross, the one he’s been avoiding for months.
    ‘I know,’ Jacqui says suddenly from the bed. ‘I do know.’
    Caffery thought she was asleep. He approaches slowly. She doesn’t open her eyes, but nods, as if to acknowledge him. She hasn’t moved, her eyes are closed, her voice muffled.
    ‘I do know.’
    ‘Know what, Jacqui? What do you know?’
    ‘I know she’s dead.’
    That Misty is still alive hasn’t realistically crossed the mind of any of the officers on the case – not for months and months. It shakes Caffery a little to realize that it’s taken time and work for Jacqui to come to the same conclusion.
    ‘And I’m OK with it,’ she continues, her eyes still closed, only her mouth working. ‘I am OK with her being dead. There’s just one thing I need.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘I just need her body back. You don’t know what it’s like, not to have a body to bury. It’s all I want.’

The Maude
    LEGEND HAS IT that Maude is the ghost of a matron from when Beechway High Secure Unit was a workhouse, back in the 1860s. Born a dwarf, she’d risen to a position of authority in the workhouse through sheer determination and single-mindedness. It was a position she abused. It is said that children who misbehaved would be subjected to Sister Maude straddling their chests, spooning ‘medicine’ into their mouths until they choked. That she would make the children write out biblical texts – line after line until their fingers bled. Some versions of the myth say Sister Maude had something under her robes she kept private: that she wasn’t really a ‘sister’ at all but actually a male dwarf dressed as a female.
    Four and a half years ago, just before AJ first came to work on the unit, an anorexic patient named Pauline Scott had convinced herself something was coming into her room at night. She claimed it would sit on her chest, would try to suffocate her. She’d showed the doctor where her thighs had been slashed. The words Be thou not one of them that committeth foul acts had been gouged into her leg. Two unfolded and bloodied paper clips had been found in Pauline’s bin – which she denied all knowledge of. No one much liked Pauline, they thought the engraving on her legs was apt. She’d been returned to Acute Assessment, where they’d monitored her for three weeks.
    When AJ arrived, shortly after the incident, it was all the staff could talk about. At night in the nurses’ station there’d be whispers and jokes, people trying to spook each other hiding in dark doorways. A few took it seriously