The countryside around the clinic had been searched: the police had ripped open every house, every wood, every livestock barn within a two-mile radius. It was unprecedented: the biggest land-based search the force had ever conducted and it had turned up nothing. No body. No clue. Misty Kitson seemed to have vanished into thin air.

The public were fascinated by the mystery, and by the unit handling the investigation. They pictured MCIU as an élite team: a group of dedicated, experienced men, pouring every ounce of energy into the case. They pictured the men clearing their heads and their lives for the case, dedicating themselves to the hunt. On the whole they were right: the officers on the case were one hundred per cent committed to finding Misty.

All, that was, except one.

Just one man was having problems concentrating on Misty. One man found that, no matter what he was supposed to be doing, what time he was supposed to be giving to finding Misty Kitson, the only place his head would go was backwards. Backwards to another case, one he’d worked on the previous week. A case he was supposed to have put away and moved on from.

That man was Detective Inspector Jack Caffery.

Inspector Caffery was new to MCIU, but he had almost twenty years of experience, most of it on the murder squad in London ’s Metropolitan Police. In all that time he’d never had trouble letting go of a case.

But, then, he’d never had a case that had scared him.

Not in the way Operation Norway had.

At eight-thirty a.m. on the morning after Flea’s accident, at the other side of town from quarry number eight, Caffery sat in his darkened office in the MCIU building at Kingswood. The blinds were down, the door was locked. He was watching a DVD.