In summer it was never too early to get up.
Our little family woke and stretched and rose from our beds and dog basket as the sky lightened and poured through the wall-to-floor windows of the loft.
We brushed our teeth and pulled on our clothes and went down to the old BMW X5, Stan dozing on Scout’s lap as we drove north to Hampstead.
At the top of the hill above Hampstead village, we parked behind Jack Straw’s Castle and crossed the road to walk through the thickly wooded Vale of Heath to the big green meadow beyond, the day still so new that the entire meadow was teeming with rabbits.
Scout slipped Stan off his lead and, endlessly tolerant to all living creatures, he trotted hopefully towards the rabbits, ready to play, but they stood on their hind legs at our approach, their noses twitching at the presence of human and dog and danger, and ancient instincts sent them scurrying to their burrows, so fast it felt like a disappearing act. And then we were alone.
It was still too early for the serious runners, and even too early for the other dog walkers. Even the young yoga woman who came to the meadow to perform her surya namaskar, her daily salute to the rising sun, had not yet arrived.
Having the Heath to ourselves always felt like a winning Lottery ticket.
We walked deeper into the Heath, Scout and Stan and I, and all three of us knew those trees and paths and fields as well as we knew our own home. Without discussing it, we turned right into the thick woodland of East Heath, cool and dark under the canopy of trees, and came out on Pryor’s Field, the series of linked ponds in the distance glinting like a string of pearls. We headed for the dazzling water, watched by a solitary kestrel gliding high above us.
By the time we got to Hampstead High Street, they were just opening up at the Coffee Cup, and we ate pancakes with blueberries and maple syrup at one of the outside tables, Scout slipping Stan morsels of pancake under the table as we watched the world wake up. Our walks on the Heath were always the best part of the day.
There are churches all over Hampstead, up on Heath Street and down on Church Row, and two of them on either side of Pond Street leading down to the Royal Free Hospital, and a small Roman Catholic church tucked away on Vernon Mount and a large white church on the corner of Downshire Hill and Keats Grove.
And as I was paying the bill at the Coffee Cup, they all began to ring their bells at once.
I looked at Scout. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving.
She felt me watching her and opened her eyes.
‘I’m not making a wish,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘Don’t let me stop you wishing, Scout,’ I said. ‘I would be very sad if I thought that I had stopped you wishing when you hear the sound of the bells. OK?’
‘OK,’ she said, closing her eyes.
My phone began to vibrate.
JOY ADAMS CALLING, it said.
‘I’m at Broadmoor Hospital, sir,’ she said. ‘The doctors called me and asked me to speak to Liam Mahone.’
Liam Mahone – the only surviving member of the Mahone family.
Little Liam who was four years old when someone came to his house one Sunday lunchtime with a can of petrol and emptied it over Liam’s family before threatening to set them all alight.
Liam Mahone who had been catatonic for all of his adult life.
‘I thought Liam didn’t talk,’ I said.
‘He’s talking now, sir. He saw a face on TV. And it brought it all back. All of it.’
‘Can’t you get a statement?’
‘You are going to need to come down here, sir,’ Adams said. ‘And the boss. Now.’
I looked at my watch. Broadmoor Hospital is a forty-mile drive from London.
‘We have a press conference at West End Central at ten a.m.,’ I said. ‘The boss wants to tell the world that we found Jessica Lyle.’
After we had found Minky’s body, the mood had turned sour against the police. There were disapproving hashtags on social media – #WrongBody, #DumbPigs, #HighgateGaffe – and an online petition for us to prioritise missing children instead of missing adults.
Because in the end they always lose faith if we search in vain. Give it long enough and the press and the public and the social media sites who were initially so keen for us to find the missing one – the angelic child, the beautiful woman – in the end they lose patience with a fruitless search, and they give up on us, and they give up on the special missing one, and they complain about the wasted money and wasted time and the wasted effort and, above all, the rank stupidity of people like me.
‘The press conference is the boss’s idea,’ I said. ‘She wants to tell them all – the press, the public, the snowflakes with their hashtags and online petitions – that we found Jessica Lyle.’
I could hear Joy Adams breathing.
And in the background, beyond the sound of her breathing, I could hear a man screaming.
‘Cancel it,’ she told me.
Broadmoor Hospital.
The big, sprawling red-brick Victorian building that sits beyond the green, gently sloping hills of Crowthorne, Berkshire, and high walls of razor wire. Whitestone and I passed through two full body searches and into the hospital’s inner courtyard, and then under an arch where the old red brickwork of the Victorian lunatic asylum finally gives way to newer buildings.
Broadmoor is not a prison.
But it is more secure than any prison I ever saw.
Two massive guards led us down long corridors the colour of buttercups.
Heavy reinforced doors were opened and then closed and locked behind us before the next door was opened. That was the sound of Broadmoor. The sound of doors being slammed shut. And distant sounds of deep distress.
Finally we came to the Paddock Centre where a man wearing a personal attack alarm was waiting for us with Joy Adams.
‘Professor Tomlinson,’ he said. ‘I’m Liam’s clinician. He’s waiting for us.’
We followed him further down the bright canary-yellow corridors, and the massive set of keys attached to his waist jingled softly in a quiet that was broken only by the sound of a TV programme about the pros and cons of moving to the countryside.
The corridor opened up into a communal space where a group of men sat under the TV set. They were all massively overweight. They showed no interest in us, or even awareness of our presence.
Beyond the TV area there were doors with no windows.
‘Isolation cells,’ Professor Tomlinson said, and beyond one door I heard a low moaning sound. ‘Patients stay in these when they become over-excited. Liam is resting in one of these cells right now. As I explained to TDC Adams, he has been a little upset by what he saw on the news.’
At the end of the yellow corridor, a huge guard waited outside a locked door.
Professor Tomlinson gave him a nod and he opened it up.
Inside, a slightly built man sat watching a TV set that was not turned on.
He was uniquely thin in that place of morbidly obese men.
‘Good morning, Liam,’ Professor Tomlinson said in his soft sing-song voice. ‘You remember TDC Adams – Joy. And these are her colleagues. DCI Whitestone and DC Wolfe. Pat and Max. If it is all right with you, Pat and Max would appreciate it if you could tell them exactly what you told Joy.’
‘Hello, Liam,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to meet you.’
Liam Mahone sighed.
He lifted his right arm and he sniffed it.
‘What’s he doing?’ Whitestone asked Professor Tomlinson.
But we knew what Liam Mahone was doing.
He was smelling the petrol that he had been doused with at the other end of his lifetime.
I tried to picture him as a four-year-old child, and I tried to imagine the terror that had come calling that day. But that child was gone now and there was only this damaged man.
‘Hi, Liam,’ Joy said. ‘Remember me?’
He exhaled again, not looking at us. He gave his arm another tentative sniff, as if making sure the imagined stink of death was still there.
‘What exactly is wrong with Liam?’ I quietly asked Professor Tomlinson.
‘DPSD,’ he said. ‘Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder. Many psychiatrists dislike the term because it is not a clinical diagnosis. It covers a group of patients who are considered to be a danger to the public.’ He crouched by the side of Liam Mahone. ‘Do you feel like talking, Liam?’
Liam continued to stare at the TV without seeing it.
I crouched by his side.
‘Look at this picture, Liam,’ I said.
He moved his head to stare at the A4 printout of Derek Bumpus, the tip of his index finger warily tracing the four creases where it had been folded inside my jacket. Bumpus’s great round face stared belligerently at the camera in the police mugshot.
‘Joy told me you saw this man’s picture on TV and you became very upset,’ I said. ‘And I think that’s because this man once threatened to hurt you and your family. Have I got that right, Liam?’
Liam Mahone looked at Joy. Then he looked at Professor Tomlinson. And finally he looked at me, then quickly looked away. He sighed and nodded.
‘What did you tell Joy?’ I asked.
‘That man said that he was going to burn us,’ Liam Mahone said. ‘My brothers. My sisters. My mum and dad. And me. He meant it, too! He wasn’t just saying it! He was going to burn us up and he poured this stuff – the stuff that you set fire to and it burns you – all over us. And then the woman with him struck a match and said she was going to do it.’
I looked at Joy.
She nodded.
‘Liam,’ I said. ‘You mean the man.’ I showed him the print of Derek Bumpus. ‘You mean the other man with this man in the picture. The second man. The man who was in charge. Harry Flowers. That’s the name of the other man. The man who gave the orders. You mean the man in the picture – Derek Bumpus – was with the other man. Isn’t that what you mean, Liam?’
He frowned with impatience.
And then he sniffed his arm, more forcefully this time.
‘The woman was in charge,’ he said. ‘The lady told him what to do and he did it. Anything she told him, he had to do or else. This man’ – indicating the mugshot of Derek Bumpus – ‘he did what she told him to do.’
And at last Liam Mahone looked me in the eye.
‘It was the woman,’ he said.
Then he sighed more deeply than he had sighed before, and closed his eyes, as if ready to slip into a heavily medicated sleep.
And I understood now that a lot of people hated Harry Flowers. But nobody – not the Mahone family, not his embittered employees, not any business rivals, not any abandoned mistress – hated him quite as much as the woman who had helped to build his empire, and stood by his side, and turned her face away from every betrayal.
Nobody hated him quite as much as his wife.