Laying Out the Bones

Book 0: The DI Lockyer Mysteries

by Kate Webb

Genres: Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

A TERRIBLE CRIME WAITS TO BE UNEARTHED.

The second twisty and atmospheric Wiltshire-set crime novel in the DI Lockyer Series. Perfect for fans of Ann Cleeves and Val McDermid.

A long, hot summer in Wiltshire is broken by a sudden downpour. Flash floods bring something sinister to the surface - a human skeleton. When forensic testing matches the bones to a man named Lee Geary, reported missing nine years earlier, the case is passed to DI Matt Lockyer.

Geary was a known drug user, so it could be a simple case of misadventure, but Lockyer isn't so sure. Geary was a townie, and had learning disabilities, so what was he doing out on the Plain all alone? Lockyer soon learns that the year he disappeared, Geary was questioned in relation to another crime - the murder of a young woman named Holly Gilbert.

With the help of DC Gemma Broad, Lockyer begins to dig deeper, and discovers that two other persons of interest in the Holly Gilbert case have also either died or disappeared in the intervening years. A coincidence? Or a string of murders that has gone undetected for nearly a decade...?

Release date: October 26, 2023

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 480

Sample

1

Day 1, Monday

Sweat was soaking through the back of Detective Inspector Matt Lockyer’s shirt. Beside him, DC Gemma Broad was fanning herself with the case file. It was half past nine in the morning, getting hotter by the minute, and it’d been an uphill walk to the lonely burial site on Salisbury Plain.

They were standing where steep banks on three sides formed a miniature valley. Back in February – one of the wettest on record – it had flooded. Torrential rain, sluicing down from the saturated hills, had broken the ground in places, carving impromptu banks as it ran away. It had uncovered large chunks of flint, unidentified military junk and the skeleton of a man.

Out there, miles from anyone else, Lockyer and Broad had taken off the face masks they were supposed to wear at all times.

‘About here?’ Broad said.

She was standing beside a gnarled hawthorn tree where the ground had washed away. After that drenched February had come the sunniest May on record. Now, in July, England was in the grip of a heat-­wave. It had put highlights in Broad’s fair hair – the wispy curls at her temples were almost white. Freckles had come out across her nose, and her cheeks were flushed.

Lockyer nodded. ‘He had hawthorn leaves and berries caught up in his clothes, which must have come from that tree and gone into the grave with him.’

‘Can’t have been much of a grave.’

Beneath the thin soil the ground soon hit chalk, which you’d need a mattock and a lot of muscle to dig into, not a spade and a hurry. It was much the same all over Salisbury Plain.

Lockyer shuffled the crime-­scene photographs until he found the headshot. A man’s skull with gaping eye sockets, wearing a macabre grin of crooked, tannin-­stained teeth.

Possibly the grin of a murderer.

‘Chalk’s very alkaline,’ he said. ‘A body can decompose up to three times slower in alkaline soil than in acid, depending on the conditions. Pathologist’s best guess is he’s been here anywhere between five years and whenever he was last seen.’

There were still strands of hair on the dead man’s head, along with the leathery memory of a nose, and other bits and pieces – some of clothing, some of flesh. Scraps of cartilage held his bottom jaw in place.

‘And he was last seen . . .’ Broad flipped a couple of pages of a stapled sheaf ‘. . . on the eighteenth of November 2011. So, he died sometime between 2011 and five years ago? 2015? That’s a four-­year window, potentially. I guess we should keep that in mind, and not assume it happened in 2011.’

Broad was clipped, focused. This was the big one she’d been hoping for, a case their colleagues on the Wiltshire force would be following. The MCIT – Major Crime Investigation Team – had begun an investigation back in March when the body was found by a dirt-­bike rider. And even with the various police teams physically isolated from each other in the wake of the pandemic, Lockyer had picked up the buzz when the body was identified. The significance of this man, Lee Geary, being found where he was.

He remembered the case clearly. He’d gone straight to Detective Superintendent Considine to argue that the discovery of the body should be treated as new evidence in the shelved 2011 case, and assigned to him and Broad as a cold case. There’d been some debate higher up, but with the MCIT as stretched as ever with live cases, Considine – with reservations – had agreed with him.

Crouching, he ran his fingers across the broken soil by the hawthorn tree. It was parched now, set into hard clods. He broke some off and crumbled it, but there was no hint of a breeze to carry the dust away. Not there, in that sheltered dip of land. It was eerily quiet, and very private. Small wonder the body had lain undiscovered for years.

As Lockyer stood up, something colourful caught his eye. Knotted around one of the hawthorn branches was a scrap of yellow tape. He reached up. Not tape, something much softer. Ribbon, perhaps even silk.

With small beads of sweat along her hairline, Broad was now squinting at a close-­up of Lee’s skull.

‘You can’t make out the head wound very well from this,’ she said, as the sun dazzled from the glossy paper.

‘No,’ Lockyer said. ‘We need to go and see him.’

‘Really?’ She sounded surprised.

‘Right now he’s our only witness.’

‘I just thought . . . we’ve got the post-­mortem report as part of the MCIT file.’

‘It’s always worth actually talking to the pathologist, Gem. They’re often more willing to speculate verbally than on paper.’

‘Okay. Great.’

‘Did you notice the rocks?’ he said.

Here and there throughout the hollow the ground had spat up large chunks of chalk and flint. Some had sharp corners and jagged edges, but some, quite naturally, were rounded and bulbous in shape. There was one right at the base of the hawthorn tree. Big and round, perfectly capable of fracturing a skull.

‘You don’t reckon that’s the murder weapon?’ Broad said.

‘Or it’s where he hit his head, having stumbled down the slope,’ Lockyer said. ‘There’s a chance this wasn’t murder, since we’re keeping open minds.’

‘I suppose it’s steep enough, if you tripped. But really? Given what happened to the others? And if he just fell, who buried him?’

They’d both read the PM report, and heard the station gossip about one particularly dark detail: the presence of debris in the remains of the victim’s airways. It raised the chilling possibility that he’d been buried alive.

‘Let’s go,’ Lockyer said. ‘It’s roasting down here.’

They climbed to where the view stretched for miles in either direction, to a hazy horizon. Steep ridges climbed up to the high plateau, like the petrified waves of some ancient green sea.

The distant bleating of sheep reminded Lockyer of home. He needed to go to Westdene, his family’s farm, straight after work. Needed to check what the hell was happening, if the hospital had called, if his father was coping okay. Or at all.

He made himself focus. Broad turned a full circle, shading her eyes with both hands. A few isolated farms were visible, and the handful of houses of the village of Everleigh to the north.

‘He’s a long way off the footpath,’ she said. ‘Could he have been hiking? With a mate? He fell and hit his head, or there was an argument. Either way, the mate panics, conceals the body.’

‘But why panic if he just fell?’ Lockyer said. ‘Why not call an ambulance? Plus there are enough warning signs around here about staying on the path, and not digging.’

They were well into one of the Ministry of Defence’s training areas, where past live-­fire exercises meant that any stray object you happened across might be unexploded ordnance that could take your leg off. Or worse.

‘Plus you’d need a shovel, even for a shallow grave,’ he added.

‘Metal detectorists?’ Broad said. ‘They get everywhere, and they’ve always got spades with them.’

‘It’s a thought.’

‘Something ritualistic?’ she tried. ‘Aren’t hawthorn trees sacred? To, like, druids?’

‘I think that’s mistletoe.’

Lockyer didn’t give the thought much credence, but there was something compelling about the grassy hollow with the single gnarled hawthorn tree at its heart. Why not the scrub of blackthorn and bramble that usually grew in such places? It was almost as though it’d been cleared, the tree revealed. Chosen, for some reason, or deliberately planted there.

Skylarks fluttered high above their heads, singing almost manically, as though the heat were getting to them, too. Lockyer looked at the crime-­scene photo again. The skull was large, with jutting brow ridges and a heavy, square jaw. He’d been an enormous man. The PM and the original missing-­person report had put him at six feet nine inches tall. The bones of his thighs and arms were massive. It was hard to imagine he’d been easy to kill. You’d need to have been completely determined, and not hesitated for a second.

‘But are we really thinking this was an accident?’ Broad said. ‘Got to be linked to Holly Gilbert, hasn’t it?’

‘Well, it’s up to us to prove that, Gem,’ Lockyer said. ‘Come on.’

He slowed his pace so that Broad wouldn’t have to jog to keep up. His legs were the longer by far.

 

The air-­conditioning in his old Volvo hadn’t worked for years, and after an hour parked in the sun it was like an oven inside, the leather seats scorching. Broad rubbed a tissue across her sweaty forehead, and Lockyer set off too fast, before he’d even got his seatbelt done up, just to get some air in through the windows. The racket made it hard to talk.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll remember when it happened,’ Lockyer shouted. ‘Holly Gilbert, I mean. You’d have been . . . what? Thirteen?’

‘Fifteen, guv,’ Broad said. ‘And, actually, I went to the vigil.’

‘Yeah? How come?’ Lockyer had seen it on the local news. Candles in jam jars, and an air of collective outrage that was almost like hunger. Holly’s pretty face turned into a talisman.

‘I think my mum thought it’d help. We were stuck in the traffic jam that morning, you see. Sat in it for hours. In the end they closed the road further back and turned us all around to get us clear. I was supposed to be going on an end-­of-­year trip to Alton Towers, catching a minibus from Tidworth at ridiculous o’clock in the morning. When I found out what had caused the hold-­up,’ Broad shook her head, ‘I got a bit obsessed, I suppose. Had some bad dreams. All that time I’d been moaning about missing the bus, ­Holly’d been lying there, a few hundred metres away. Dying.’

Lockyer glanced at her. ‘And did it help? The vigil?’

‘Not really. There were loads of people there, wearing T-­shirts with Holly’s face on, and sending up those paper lanterns that kill wildlife. The press were going around asking people who’d never even met Holly what she’d meant to them. Some action group made a speech about ending violence against women and girls. I suppose I felt I had no right to be there, in the end. Like none of us did, really.’

Lockyer drove on in silence. He remembered it from the local papers. The excited baying when arrests were made, the damning profiles of the suspects, then the disappointment when it all fell apart. Petering out, as news stories do when there’s nothing new to add. Largely forgotten after a year or two, except by those who’d loved the victim.

 

They had an appointment to talk to Lee Geary’s sister in the afternoon, so there was time to cool down at the station first, to reread the misper report and the MCIT file. As the Wiltshire force’s two-­person Major Crime Review team, Lockyer and Broad were based at the county police headquarters, a sprawling 1960s brick building on the edge of the market town of Devizes. Heat shimmered over the car park as they pulled up.

‘Bit like Miami Vice, isn’t it?’ Broad said drily, folding her shades into her chest pocket as a large, uniformed officer crossed towards the building, adjusting his belt beneath his beer gut, the armpits of his shirt sopping with sweat.

The station was air-­conditioned, apart from the tiny third-­floor office Lockyer and Broad shared. No matter how much they peered through the vents, pressed the buttons or thumped it, nothing but warm air ever poured from the unit. Lockyer had put in a request for repair, because Broad was clearly suffering, but in truth he hated air-­con. Using electricity to cool the air when the use of electricity was making the world hotter.

He dialled his mother’s bedside line in Salisbury District Hospital, gripping the phone tightly, willing Trudy to pick up. He let it ring twenty times or more, sinking inside. He told himself she was probably just asleep, or that the nurses had left the phone, on its retractable arm, out of reach. That her not answering didn’t necessarily mean she was worse again.

They were out of the tightest lockdown measures, but the hospital was still very strict about visitors. One per day, per patient, for a maximum of an hour, by appointment. Ironic, given that Trudy had caught Covid-­19 in hospital. For several weeks, they hadn’t been permitted to see her at all.

Next he rang his father. John was at home alone for the first time ever, and the thought of him all by himself, with his wife in hospital, made Lockyer profoundly uneasy. Like seeing a glass teetering, and knowing he’d never catch it if it fell. John had promised to carry his mobile with him at all times, but he didn’t answer. Frustrated, Lockyer gave up. He opened the file on the man whose makeshift grave they’d just been to see.

Lee Geary had been twenty-­seven years old when he’d disappeared, nine years previously, in 2011. Last seen on the morning of 18 November by his sister, Karen, at her flat in Salisbury. In Lee’s mugshot there were blue eyes beneath those glowering, Neanderthal brows, dark circles under them, and a gaze that was unfocused rather than glaring or aggressive. Stoned, perhaps. He was pale and spotty, with ingrown hairs along his jaw, his scalp shaved to a gingery stubble. The entire right side of his head was covered by a tattoo of a spider’s web with a grinning skull at its centre. The irony of that was not lost on Lockyer.

Put plainly, Lee Geary looked like a thug. Not a man you’d want to meet in a dark alley, or an isolated spot on Salisbury Plain. And if you were planning on hitting him over the head, you’d better make damn sure you only had to do it once. Preferably before he saw you coming.

There’d been no form of ID on the body. If he’d had a wallet or anything else in his pockets on the day he died, they’d vanished since. Karen had handed in his toothbrush and razor when he’d gone missing, to provide DNA for identification should he ever turn up in an unrecognizable state. But she needn’t have bothered. Lee had been arrested repeatedly from his early teens onwards, before he’d ever met Holly Gilbert or been linked to her terrible death. His DNA was already on the database.

Karen had also provided the Salisbury force with a list of Lee’s known associates and hang-­outs, all within Salisbury. His hobbies did not include hiking, metal detecting or archaeology. He’d been wearing Nike trainers with no socks when he was killed, synthetic tracksuit bottoms, a grey hoodie and a gold ring in his left ear. He was a townie. Whatever he’d been doing out on the plain, Lockyer doubted he’d been out walking for his recreation. So perhaps he hadn’t gone there. Perhaps he’d been taken there. The hollow with the hawthorn tree was a quiet, secluded place for illicit activity. Or an execution.

Lockyer put the two photos side by side – Lee’s face in life, and his skull as it was now. Teeth that had been hidden behind chapped lips were now bared; the spider’s web tattoo had decomposed completely. Nine years was a long time for his death to have gone undetected. A long time for anyone to be left to rot like that, no matter what they’d done in life. A long time for whoever had killed him to think they’d got away with it. And if Lee Geary had been buried alive, that hinted at an incredible rage. The deliberate infliction of suffering and terror. An urge to enact the worst kind of revenge.

2

Karen Wilkins, née Geary, lived in a 1990s brick box of a house in Bulford. Once a rural village, it was now sandwiched between two military camps, and the busy A303 roared past a hundred metres or so to the south. The background noise, as Lockyer and Broad got out of the car, was of constant traffic.

Karen’s front lawn was parched and almost completely bald. A toddler’s pink bicycle lay abandoned on its side; plastic windmills were stuck in a pot of thirsty petunias. Broad rang the doorbell, and looked pained at the answering shriek from inside. She’d carefully removed the expression by the time the door opened.

‘You’re the police? Come in,’ Karen said, without waiting for an answer or asking to see their ID. She was wiry, and wore very little makeup; had a toddler clamped on one hip, and a harried expression – hardly surprising for a woman with two young children, after months of home schooling, when even the nurseries had been shut. The toddler gazed at them suspiciously: more strangers in masks.

Karen led them through to the back of the house, where a kitchen-­diner had been extended out over a garden that had already been small. Bi-­fold doors were wide open, letting in the heat, and a girl of about five was sitting disconsolately in her paddling pool, every scrap of skin covered by a lurid, sun-­proof suit. The kitchen floor was littered with toys, the space next to the sink piled with plastic crockery and Emma Bridgewater spotty mugs.

‘Tea? Coffee?’ Karen said, as Lockyer and Broad showed their warrant cards.

‘Thanks, but we’d better not,’ Broad said.

‘Oh, right. Covid.’

She ushered them onto a grubby red sofa, deposited the small child on the floor, and perched herself on a stool at the breakfast bar.

‘So, you’re investigating now? About Lee?’

‘That’s right,’ Lockyer said. ‘We’re from Major Crime Review.’

‘Review? Like, cold cases? Does that mean the other lot’s given up already?’

She didn’t sound particularly angry, or even surprised. Just flat.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Lockyer said. ‘We’ve yet to determine exactly how your brother lost his life, whether anybody else was involved, or whether it links to any other cases. DC Broad and I are taking over to see if we can advance the investigation.’

‘How he lost his life?’ Karen echoed. ‘Hit over the head, I was told.’

‘Well, that appears to have been the cause of death. But he may simply have fallen.’

‘Out in the middle of nowhere? What’s he supposed to have been doing there?’

‘We were hoping you might be able to help us there,’ Broad said, with a smile to which Karen didn’t respond. ‘Do you mind answering a few questions about Lee?’

‘Of course I don’t. I’ve been waiting nine years for someone to give enough of a shit to come and ask questions about him— Poppy, I’ve warned you twice!’ she suddenly shouted at the kid in the paddling pool, who’d been about to dump a fistful of soil into the water. ‘Sorry,’ Karen said to them. ‘We’re going out of our heads in this heat.’

‘I know exactly how you feel,’ Broad murmured.

‘Can you tell us about your brother? What was he like?’ Lockyer asked.

Karen thought about it for a moment, then gave a cynical little smile. ‘You’ve seen his police record, I suppose. That picture of him with a skinhead and that God-­awful tattoo. The one that was all over the papers? Well, he wasn’t like that at all.’

‘No?’

‘Look, Lee was . . .’ Karen searched for the right words. ‘Let me just spell it out, right? He was as thick as two short planks. But he was a sweet guy. All that stuff – the tattoo, the drugs . . . He was just really easily led. We grew up on a shitty estate and it was way too easy for him to fall in with the wrong crowd. They always wanted to have Lee along if things looked likely to kick off – all he had to do was loom.’

Lockyer and Broad exchanged a look, and Karen bridled. ‘You don’t believe me? You must have access to his school records, and all that? They had him assessed. He had a non-­syndromic ID – an intellectual disability. Well, borderline. His IQ was seventy-­four and the threshold is seventy, but basically, yeah. He was a sweetheart, though. A gentle giant.’

‘So other people got him into trouble?’

‘Exactly.’ Karen’s eyes glittered. ‘We got bugger-­all help from the state since what Lee had wasn’t anything with a name. He had a classroom assistant, who did her best, but he left school without a single GCSE. We tried to get him a job he could stick at – he worked at the big Waitrose for a while, rounding up all the trolleys – but nothing lasted. His so-­called mates were always taking him off places when he should have been at work, and in the end he’d get fired. He’d have been all right if they’d just left him alone.’

‘So, the things he was charged with . . .’ Lockyer checked his notes ‘. . . possession of class-­C drugs, anti-­social behaviour, vandalism, and the conviction for burglary?’

‘Yeah, well. He did those things, I suppose.’ The weariness was back. ‘It was just small-­town kid’s stuff. If we’d been well-­off and lived in a nice area, and if he’d looked less like an ogre, he’d have held down a basic job and had a little flat somewhere, eaten cheese toasties for every meal, watched TV and been happy. But we didn’t, so he didn’t. We lived on a rough estate and he stood out like a sore thumb to all the wrong people.’ She thought back. ‘That tattoo wasn’t even his idea.’

‘No?’

‘No. A mate of his, Badger – Nigel Badgely – got him pissed one day and took him to get it done. Probably thought it’d be funny. Twat. But Lee wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not ever. That’s the God’s honest truth. He looked like a brute but he wasn’t. Nothing upset him more than violence, or even just shouting. Confrontation, you know.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it was difficult for him,’ Lockyer said, struggling to fit the simple soul Karen was describing into the physical body of the man in the photograph. But he’d noticed the softness in Lee’s eyes straight away, in spite of the face they looked out from. He’d put it down to drugs, written him off as a thug. Like everyone else, by the sound of it.

Red patches flared on Karen’s cheeks, as though she couldn’t stand the least hint of pity. ‘He did all right. He understood how money worked and . . .’ she waved a hand ‘. . . life stuff. But he was gullible. He believed whatever he was told. And he had no initiative. He always looked to other people to tell him what to do.’

She got up, wrenched open a drawer and riffled through it until she found what she was after. ‘Here.’

She handed Lockyer a photograph of herself and Lee, sitting at a plastic table in what looked like a branch of Burger King. She had her arms around his massive shoulders – they wouldn’t reach all the way. Lee’s hair was tufty rather than shorn. He looked younger than he did in his mugshot, and was laughing. Holding a chip as though pretending to smoke it, between fingers like sausages.

‘That was my big brother,’ Karen said, with a catch in her voice. ‘All Lee wanted out of life was a plate of food, and for everyone to be happy.’

‘Do you mind if I take a copy of this?’ Lockyer said.

Karen shook her head, so he took a picture with his phone.

‘That’s how I know he didn’t have anything to do with that girl’s death. He’d never have hurt her – or anyone else.’

‘Not even if someone told him to?’

‘No. Not even then.’ She was adamant. ‘Anyway, he was released without charge. All three of them were.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about Holly Gilbert? Or what happened that night?’

‘Not much. I asked him, of course. He said he didn’t know anything about it, and I believed him. He was always a rubbish liar – didn’t have the imagination for it.’

‘You were both living in Salisbury at the time, so it’s a good twenty miles to where Lee was found. Did he drive?’

‘No, he never wanted to learn. Probably for the best.’

‘So how did he get about?’ Lockyer asked.

‘People drove him. He hated being in a car, though. He preferred taking the bus – more room, you see. And walking. He wouldn’t think twice about walking somewhere.’

‘But not twenty miles? To Everleigh?’

‘No,’ Karen said.

‘Did he know anybody there? Any friends?’ Lockyer trod carefully: he wasn’t sure how much Karen knew, and didn’t want to seed information.

She frowned. ‘Not that I know of, but he wasn’t in my pocket, you know? I tried to keep my eye on him, but I had my own life, too.’

‘How did Lee come to be homeless?’ Broad asked.

‘He wasn’t homeless – not like that makes it sound.’

The toddler on the rug screamed with sudden ferocity. Karen bent down and hoisted her up, kissing her sticky forehead until she settled.

‘Our mum’d died that winter – she had a heart attack out of nowhere. Lee was devastated. It was really hard for him to get to grips with. He’d just got a little bedsit of his own off the social, after waiting a year and a half, but he got done for anti-­social behaviour after Mum died, and the council chucked him out. I appealed, but he never showed up for the interview.’ She looked angry. ‘I expect one of his mates had a hand in that. They didn’t want him to be independent. They wanted him on a leash, like a dog. Bastards.’

‘B’studs,’ the little girl muttered.

‘Shh, don’t say that word,’ Karen said. ‘Least of all in front of Daddy,’ she added, for Lockyer and Broad’s benefit.

‘So Lee was staying with you?’

‘Yeah, off and on. He sofa-­surfed a few places – not that he fitted on a sofa.’

Lockyer sympathized. He never slept well on a sofa, and he was only a couple of inches over six feet, and lean rather than meaty.

‘I hadn’t met my husband then,’ Karen went on. ‘I was living with another boyfriend and we only had one bedroom. But I was hardly going to turn my own brother out, was I? I did my best.’ She searched about on the worktop, found half a banana and gave it to the toddler. ‘I tried to help him, but . . . maybe I didn’t do a very good job.’

‘Lee was twenty-­seven, Mrs Wilkins,’ Lockyer said. ‘He was an adult.’

‘Yeah, but he was vulnerable,’ she said tersely, and Lockyer abandoned any thought of consoling her.

He knew all about self-­recrimination. The dark lure of blame, of replaying events, over and over, wishing you’d done things differently. He could have been with his own brother, Christopher, on the night he was killed. Instead he’d chosen to be elsewhere. Knowing he couldn’t change that didn’t stop him revisiting the decision over and over again.

‘And you heard nothing from Lee after you saw him on the morning of November the eighteenth?’ he said. ‘No phone calls, or texts, nothing like that?’

‘No.’

‘But he did have a phone?’

‘Yeah. Just a really basic one – you know those ones they make for old people?’

‘Okay.’ Lockyer made a note. ‘After such a long time, it might be hard for us to establish exactly when your brother died, but—’

‘He died that same day,’ Karen interrupted.

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘He went off that morning and didn’t come back. He didn’t text or call, and he didn’t answer when I called.’

‘And that was unusual?’

‘Unheard of. He was always texting me to say he was on the bus, or eating his lunch, or whatever. Always. Every day.’

‘It’s possible that his phone was lost or stolen.’

‘He’d have found a way to call me. He’d have come home, if he could.’

‘And you don’t think he might have just set off for a walk, out in the countryside?’

‘By himself? No way.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘A hundred per cent. He knew Salisbury – it was his comfort zone. New places were daunting for him, let alone big empty fields with no shops or signs, no landmarks he would know. No. If he went there, it was because someone told him to, or took him.’

She pressed her lips to her daughter’s forehead again.

‘He . . . he had been out and about more, that last year,’ she said. ‘Stopping out. Those new mates of his, Ridgeway and the others. They took him to raves, all-­nighters, that kind of thing.’

‘Is that how he met Holly?’

‘I suppose.’ Karen chewed her lip. ‘I always asked where he was going, what he was doing. Trouble was, he’d figured out by then that I didn’t think much of them. I’d made him wary of telling me things . . . He hated it when I got cross with him.’

‘Do you remember any other names on the scene? Besides Ridgeway and Holly Gilbert?’

‘No. I’ve tried, but I’m not even sure Lee told me. There was that girl who was also arrested, but I suppose you know about her. And some guy did come to the flat one day, asking for Lee. He seemed all right, I suppose. Polite. But he never told me his name.’

‘And how did Lee seem, before he left on the eighteenth?’

‘Upset.’

‘Like, angry?’ Broad asked. ‘Or . . .’

‘Nervous. That’s a better word. He was twitchy. Had been for a while.’

‘And you don’t know why? He didn’t say where he was going?’

‘No.’ Karen’s eyes gleamed. ‘I was in a rush. I needed to get to work. I wish I’d made him tell me! All he said was “I have to tell them”, or something like that.’

‘“I have to tell them”? You’re sure about that?’ Lockyer said.

‘It was something like. I wasn’t paying much attention. There I was, trying to dry my hair, and he was pacing about, muttering to himself – can you imagine a bloke his size stomping about a tiny flat? So I – I snapped at him. Told him to calm down, and not make me late. But it was something like “I’ve got to say something”, or “I’m going to tell them.”’

She stared into the past. ‘I wanted him out from under my feet, so I just said “Good idea. Off you go.”’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Broad said.

‘I know that,’ Karen snapped. ‘I just wish I’d paid more at