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moment.
    ‘What’s she suggesting? Lottery winners hiding from their family or what?’
    ‘She just seemed puzzled, that’s all. She didn’t seem to think that Gordon Christie could be earning enough from his business to keep five of them in the style they seemed to be living in. Good quality clothes for the kids, a long holiday in Spain last summer…people notice these things, don’t they?’
    ‘And this is quite a substantial house, as it goes,’ Thackeray said thoughtfully. ‘A bit run down but what –four bedrooms? A big yard and garden behind. The way house prices are going it must have cost a bit.’
    ‘Dawn said it was on the market for £250,000.’
    ‘Right,’ Thackeray said. ‘You stay up here, Kevin, and go through the place for anything that fills in the gaps. I’ve got Val Ridley at the infirmary with the surviving child in case she regains consciousness.’
    ‘And the chances of that are…?’
    ‘Remote, apparently,’ Thackeray said, his face perfectly impassive. ‘In the meantime we’ve got the chopper quartering the moors again in case the Land Rover’s up there somewhere in the snow. What I need as top priority is the registration number of that vehicle. The DVLA can’t trace anything in Christie’s name, or Linda Christie’s, which is very odd. See if you can find the registration document and let me know. I’ll send Sharif up to help you as soon as he gets back from court.’
    ‘Right, guv,’ Mower said. ‘And you’ll be…?’
    ‘I’ll go to the post-mortem, for my sins, and then I’ve got a meeting with the super, who’s planning a Press conference this afternoon when he wants to expand on the fact that the son’s missing as well. That should get us some coverage in the national papers and TV. If Gordon Christie’s responsible for this mess I’ll not be too bothered if we find him dead in a ditch. It’s the boy I’m concerned about.’
    There’s a surprise, Mower thought. Thackeray might think he was concealing his emotional involvement in this case, but to anyone who knew him as well as the sergeant did, Thackeray’s painful accommodation to the case was a clear as day.
    Mower glanced around the room.
    ‘No photographs,’ he said. ‘Hang on a minute. I thinkthere’s something in the other room.’ But he returned holding only a single cardboard frame.
    ‘Just this. A school photo of the two older kids,’ he said. Thackeray took it off him and gazed at the two children, both blonde and blue eyed, the girl, shyly smiling at the camera, who was now lying fighting for her life in the infirmary and the boy, a couple of years younger and with a mischievous glint in his eyes, the son who had vanished with his father. He felt suddenly suffocated.
    ‘Let me know if you find any others. I’ll keep this for the Press conference,’ he muttered, striding quickly to the front door and brushing past the uniformed constable who was stamping his feet to keep them warm.
    Mower watched him go. He had no children himself but he knew only too well what strong emotions they aroused in others. He hoped for Thackeray’s sake that this case would be resolved quickly before it shattered the iron resolve with which he normally led his life. But the cracks, he thought, were already beginning to show.

Chapter Three
    By lunch time Sergeant Mower and Detective Constable Mohammed Sharif – generally, and apparently happily, known as Omar – were sitting in the sitting room at Moor Edge surrounded by the meagre results of the morning’s close search of the Christie family’s lives. And nothing, they had concluded gloomily, gave them much inkling why Gordon Christie might have turned a powerful handgun on three members of his family and subsequently vanished with his son.
    Mower shrugged and glanced down a checklist he had made in his notebook. Amongst the documents on the floor in neat piles was a log book for a Land Rover, which had apparently been registered in 1989, but of which