The Moon and Jack fucking Whitehead were everywhere.

Me in Brighton, two thousand light years from home.

Missing.

Bingo.

I started to write.

“So I went back through all the files, spoke to a couple of the lads, rang Manchester, and I think we’ve got something,” I said, wishing my editor would look up from the pile of Spot the bloody Ball photos on his desk.

Bill Hadden picked up a magnifying glass and asked, “Did you talk to Jack?”

“He’s not been in.” Thank Christ.

I shifted in my seat and stared out of the window, ten floors up, across a black Leeds.

“So what exactly have you got?” Hadden was stroking his silver beard, peering through the magnifying glass at the photo graphs.

“Three very similar cases…”

“In a nutshell?”

“Three missing girls. One aged eight, the others both ten. 1969,1972, yesterday. All of them went missing within yards of their homes, within miles of each other. It’s Cannock Chase all over again.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Fingers crossed.”

“I was being sarcastic. Sorry.”

“Oh.” I shifted in my seat again.

Hadden continued to peer through the glass at the black and white photographs.

I looked at my father’s watch; eight bleeding thirty.

“So what do you think?” Not hiding my irritation.

Hadden held up a black and white photograph of some footballers, one of them Gordon McQueen, going up for a cross. There was no ball. “Do you ever do these things?”

“No,” I lied, disliking the game we were about to play.

“Spot the Ball,” Bill Hadden, editor, said, “is the reason thirty-nine per cent of working-class males buy this paper. What do you think of that?”

Say yes, say no, but spare me this.

“Interesting,” I lied again, thinking the exact fucking opposite, thinking thirty-nine per cent of working-class males have been having some fun with your researchers.