Page 64 of The Unforgiven

“If I could help, I thought I should, and what I should actually be doing’s pretty slow right now. This case intrigues me.” More birdsong. Water, maybe. “Is anyone keeping an open mind that this might not be a man? Your killer could be a female?”

“There’s nothing pointing that way, and I imagine you know the statistics about male on female violence – the media have covered it pretty well.” It was still on the front pages, some stories that were going through the victimology, digging up comments left on Morgan and Brooke’s posts; some stories were more sensationalist, tales from women who thought they’d been targeted by the Push-Her.

“I knew them anyway,” he said. His background noise quietened. “Don’t let the media pull you down a route that might not lead you to the ending you need, Mia. You know women can be strong – you put your colleague on his back, didn’t you? You’re looking at a collective of men who share the same hatred, but women can be just as bad. What were groups of teenage girls like when you were a kid?”

I stayed silent, the car having come to a stop. All lanes closed.

“There would’ve always been those girls who were bitches, manipulative. Girls can be angry too.”

“Why are you suggesting this? What do you know that’s making you think this way?”

There was silence on his end now, a voice in the background.

Then Atlas, muffled. “Just speaking to my girlfriend. Give me a minute.”

I wasn’t sure if I was meant to have heard that or not.

A door closed. “Sorry, Mia. I needed a cover story. Look, I have to go, but dig into Charlie. Look at the women and what else they may have in common. I’m fucking certain there’s something else there.”

The line went dead before I could respond.

I tried to dial the number, but just as I expected, the number was not in service.

Neither was the motorway, a pause on any movement, right where there was no radio signal, just white noise, so all I had to keep me company were my thoughts.

Adult social care, which was involved with Charlie Mason up until his murder, was based in a nineteen sixties concrete monstrosity that had as much available parking as a postage stamp. The journey, it was safe to say, hadn’t been a highlight of my week so far, and while I wasn’t expecting it to get much better, I was well aware it could get worse.

Rain started again as I left my car, parked ten minutes away on a residential street that I didn’t think was residents’ permit parking only, but I’d find out later if I had a ticket on my windscreen.

A receptionist smiled at me when I walked through the doors, making me feel old because she looked about sixteen and probably was.

“Morning,” I headed over to her. “I’m Detective Sergeant Mia McAllister. I’m here to see John Leckey.”

She nodded, clicking her mouse. “He told me he was expecting you. Let me call up to the floor and I’ll get him to comedown. Take a seat – the coffee machine’s actually working if you want one.”

I did, because I was forty-five minutes late, thanks to the closed motorway and some boy racer who’d decided to do a complete three sixty, involving five other cars, a lorry and a helicopter with paramedics.

The coffee was hot and tasted more of Bovril than coffee, but again, I’d had worse, so I wasn’t going to complain. I checked my phone for emails while I was waiting for John, hoping that there would be something revolutionary to break open the case.

There wasn’t. Not that I’d expected it.

I was ten minutes into recapping everything I knew about Chelsea Bainbridge when a man in his late-fifties appeared, tall, with the build of a runner, and hearing aids, he approached me with a friendly smile.

“I see you found the coffee machine then?”

There was a common theme with public offices: coffee machines that didn’t work, produced a liquid that the trade descriptions act could take umbrage over, or only poured for certain people.

“And it worked.” I held up the paper cup. “Kind of. I’m Mia McAllister. Thank you for seeing me.”

He shrugged and smiled. “I’ve nothing better to do. I actually retired last week after thirty years, and I’m kind of missing the routine already – not the job. I don’t think I’d ever miss the job.”

“I think I can understand that.” I followed him out of the foyer through an anonymous corridor to a lift.

“You okay with lifts?”

I nodded, unsurprised by the question. I understood social services from both the perspective of a police officer and as someone who’d had a social worker from the age of four to twenty-one, although after eighteen, I’d only seen them once a year and it was a different person each time.

It was a thankless job, ruled by red tape and bureaucratic decisions rather than common sense, and several of the social workers I’d had allocated to me had spent more time off sick than in work.