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Stella knew how easy it would be to speed, so she did not go above twenty-five miles an hour all the way to Brentford. The van’s sensor opened the automatic gates to her estate and she accelerated up to her apartment block. Although the development was protected by steel gates and CCTV, here, as at Terry’s, the lighting was faulty, working during the day and going off at night. Unwilling to park by the dark garages, she put the van in a visitor bay near the foyer.
    Stella keyed in the security code, heaved on the door to override the closing mechanism and pushed it shut. A sharp ping made her jump. It was the lift. She had not called it. The door slid open and a shaft of light cut across the marble floor. She waited. No one got out. Cautiously she approached; the interior was empty. Along with the outside lights, the building’s smart controls often went awry and the lift would move without anyone operating it. Stella berated herself for succumbing to frayed nerves and stepped inside as the doors shut. Her discovery of the photos of herself in Terry’s basement had rattled her: all those faces smiling at her. No, not at her, at Terry. She could not smile at him now.
    The sparse tidiness of her flat tended to be a relief after her mother’s. Tonight it was not. Stella was alive to the hermetic silence and, with so many flats unsold, to the likelihood that she was utterly alone on this floor. She dropped her keys in a vase in the living room – a policeman’s daughter, she never left them in sight.
    In the bathroom she splashed her face with cold water and cleaned her teeth. The battery-operated brush ran down because she had forgotten to leave it on charge. She found a manual brush in the cupboard. Suzie’s muddle was catching.
    It was not until Stella was in bed that, disturbed by gripes in her stomach, she remembered that since a hurried hoisin duck wrap from the mini-mart below the office that afternoon she had eaten nothing. She was getting like Jack, who never ate properly. Jack. She did not want him to clean for Suzie: it would lead to complications. She would do it herself. Her mum had asked if she was busy on a case. Perhaps her muddle had extended to mixing up her ex-husband’s job with what her daughter did.
    This reminded Stella of the blue folder in Terry’s basement. He had taken fifteen photographs of roads and filed them according to a number order. Everything Terry did was for a purpose, so the pictures must be for a case. Although Terry had retired from the police he had not stopped being a detective.
    Stella sat up in bed. She would find out what the case was. Then she and Jack would solve it.

7
    Saturday, 23 April 1966
    She stood up on the pedals and made them go faster. The wind in the chestnut tree filled her ears and everything flew by. Her dad said it was the wrong time for conkers when Michael asked. Michael was stupid for not knowing and she had been right to tell him that. It had not been right to be told off. Mary did not say that she did not know when conkers were. She did not care about conkers.
    She whizzed around the bend in the path and skidded to a stop, her brakes squealing. She looked behind her and saw Michael and her dad huddled by the flower bed. Perhaps they were hiding from her. She grew hot. They had not noticed she was missing.
    ‘Crocuses!’ Michael had shouted when they got to the park and he had pointed at the hyacinths. Daddy did not say he was wrong because he was unscrewing the stabilizers from Michael’s birthday bike. Michael was trying to stop him taking them off by saying flower names.
    Now Daddy was doing something at the back of Michael’s birthday bike, but she could not see from here. Michael had got back on and was wobbling on the saddle, which was set too high, making his frog-legs stick out. Mary held her breath; she knew her brother was scared without the extra wheels. It made her tummy ache and she let out a squeak when the wobbling got worse. Daddy