Whatever it was I was following, it was dead ahead. Calling to me, tugging at my mind. I fought my way through prickly hawthorn and incongruously festive holly, a minor annoyance as they clutched at my padded jacket. When I reached a clearing, I broke into a run. Melanie’s face was seared in my mind, and I thought, Please, God, let it not be her. Let it be some drunk’s alcohol stash . . .

I already knew it wasn’t. There was the stench of guilt about this one, turning my stomach even as it dragged me nearer. Guilt and violence—and death.

I reached a thicket, dropped to my hands and knees, and crawled in. Twigs scratched my face, caught in my hair. Damp soaked through the knees of my jeans, the chill reaching to my bones, numbing my core. There was barely any light to see by, but I didn’t need any, my questing fingers meeting cold, waxy flesh. I fumbled to be certain and found I was holding her hand.

For a moment, I was six years old again, with the little girl in the park.

But when you’re twenty-nine and you find a body, you don’t get to go blubbing for your mother.

It started with a phone call, as these things usually do. I haven’t exactly got an office, more like a stack of files in a cardboard box that I hand over to my accountant once a quarter, and the answer phone’s on the blink, so if anyone wants to get in touch with me, they have to call my mobile.

I was out in one of the villages when he rang. There are a lot of villages around St. Albans, most of them filled up with people who commute into London to work and keep the house prices sky-high. In between, you get the green belt made up of pony farms and golf courses, plus the odd actual working farm tucked in, with small herds of placid cows looking like refugees from the nineteenth century as they chomp on the grass and idly wonder what happened to the neighbourhood.

I was fitting some new kitchen taps for Mrs. B., who made great coffee and liked to chat. I always had to be careful I didn’t go over time here. It wasn’t easy when I knew the next call was to Mrs. L., a sour-faced old biddy who always watched me like a hawk in case I made off with the teaspoons or did something unspeakable to her pet poodle.

I put down my spanner and dug my mobile out of my pocket. “Paretski Plumbing,” I answered in my jaunty “trade” voice, flashing Mrs. B. an apologetic smile. She dimpled.

“Tom? Dave Southgate. Got a little job for you.”

“Oh, yeah? Blocked toilet down at the station? Must be all those doughnuts you lot eat.” I wasn’t talking about the place you catch a train from. Dave Southgate is one of our boys in blue—or he would be, if he still wore a uniform. And when he rang, the job was never all that little, though I lived in hope.

“I wish. No—young lady by the name of Melanie Porter. Last seen going off to meet person or persons unknown three days ago—if you believe her useless yob of a hoodie boyfriend, who I personally wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw his drugs stash. We’ve received information suggesting we have a look for the young lady in the woods up by Brock’s Hollow.”

“I do have a proper job to do, you know.” Even I could hear the resignation in my voice.

“Cheers, Tom, I owe you. We’re up on Nomansland Common. Up past Devil’s Dyke—you know the area? Combing through the woodland, the usual drill. How soon can you get up here?”

I looked at my watch. “About ten minutes—I’m only down the road, as it happens. Just need to finish up.” And I’d have to ring Mrs. L. and apologise for the no-show, but that’d be more a pleasure than a duty.

I shoved my phone back in my pocket and finished tightening up the taps. Opened the supply pipes and turned the taps on and off to prove they worked. “There you go,” I said, wiping my hands on an old rag. “All sorted.”

“That’s lovely. Sure you wouldn’t like to stay for another coffee?” She gave me a winning smile, and the dimples deepened. “I’ve got some Belgian chocolate biccies.”

“Sorry, Mrs. B.,” I said regretfully. “Duty calls.”

I first met Dave Southgate around three years ago. A kiddie went missing in Verulamium Park, and they put out an appeal on local radio for help finding the little lad. He was only three. I tracked him down under a bush right next to the main road, crying his little heart out and clutching a half-eaten loaf of bread he’d taken to feed the ducks.

Obviously, me being a single gay man who’d managed to find a missing toddler, it wasn’t just as simple as handing the kid over and receiving the effusive thanks of a grateful police force. There were a lot of searching questions about just how I’d known where to look. Eventually, I managed to convince Sergeant Southgate, as he then was, I just had this knack of finding stuff. Or people, as it might be. Since then, he’s called me in a few times to look for things—burglars’ loot, hidden drugs—and bodies.

It’s a bit hard to explain, but I can’t just find any old thing. I’m not some bloody database on the location of everything in the world. It’s only certain types of things. And usually, there has to be some strong emotion involved. So lost things are almost always impossible, because if you’d been feeling that strongly about the thing at the time, chances are you wouldn’t have lost it, would you? Hidden things, on the other hand, call out to me. All the guilt and shame and sneakiness involved in the hiding acts as a kind of beacon. And I can often tell from the feeling just what sort of thing it is that’s hidden.

I mean, say you buried a suitcase in your garden. I’d have a pretty good idea before I dug it up whether it contained your collection of hard-core porn, letters from a lover, or the body of your dead baby.

Bodies, actually, are the classic one. I have to be close enough physically—although there’s tricks I can do to help, I’ll get on to those later—but once I’m there, it’s like they’re howling at me.

The first one I found, I thought she really was howling.

It was back when we lived in London. She wasn’t anyone I knew. I think Mum knew her mum a bit, but that was all. She was too young to have played with me, and certainly too young to have played with my sister. She was only four, you see, when it happened. Just wandered off in the park, I guess, met a man who seemed really friendly . . . do I have to spell it out for you? He’d hidden her under some bushes, right in a patch of nettles. Must have been wearing gloves, I suppose. I had shorts on when I found her, and I got covered in stings.

But she was crying, at least I thought she was, and I knew I couldn’t leave her there. So I crept in after her, calling out, “Don’t cry—it’s all right.”

Of course, it wasn’t all right. Not for her, and not for her poor mum and dad. For them, I expect it was never all right again. She stopped crying as soon as I found her, so maybe she found some peace. I don’t know. I thought she was asleep, but she was so cold. I tried to drag her out, but I was worried I’d hurt her, so in the end, I left her there and ran and got my mum.

And then things got very grown-up, very fast.

Anyway. Hidden things. Lost things, sometimes. And water, funnily enough. I’ve never really understood that one.

I rubbed my hip as I walked over the rough grassland of the common to the edge of a scrubby patch of woodland, where I could see Dave and a couple of police dogs with their handlers. I broke my pelvis badly when I was seventeen—got hit by a car and spent months recovering—and it aches whenever the weather turns cold and damp. Which, this being Britain, it does quite a lot, especially in November. Maybe I’d move to Florida when I retired.

Maybe a passing porker would be able to fly me there.

“All right, Dave?” I called out when I got to where they were standing, grim-faced.

Dave’s face broke into a relieved almost-smile, although the men with the dogs cast me sceptical glances. Dave was a big bloke, by which I mean a bit too fond of beer and takeaways. He was tall compared to my five foot eight, but probably only average compared to everyone else. I don’t mind. In fact, it’s pretty handy for a plumber, being small—especially when you’re working in one of those new, shoebox-sized houses they throw up everywhere these days, with the sort of bathrooms where you step out of the bath to find you’ve got one foot in the toilet.

“Tom. Good to see you.” Dave took a deep breath. “Right. Melanie Porter. She’s a twenty-three-year-old estate agent, works down in the village. Boyfriend, as I said, a bit on the dodgy side. He’s got previous for drugs, petty crime—that sort of thing. Supposed to have settled down since he met the young lady—at least, he’s stayed out of trouble for nearly a year now. His story is she got a call Saturday night and told him she had to go out. They had a blazing row about it—we’ve got the neighbour’s corroboration for that—and she left, and he hasn’t seen her since. Or, depending which theory you subscribe to, he bludgeoned her to death and disposed of the body sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning.”

“So why do you think she’s here?” I nodded over at the trees.

“Anonymous tip-off. Said if we want to find Melanie, we’re to look around here.” He scratched his nose. Somebody really ought to buy him some nose-hair clippers for Christmas, I thought, distracted for a moment by the bushy growths that sprouted unchecked from his nostrils. “Be pretty convenient for him, if he did do it. They lived just over there, in a council flat.” Dave inclined his head towards the Dyke Hill estate, an unlovely but functional collection of houses and flats for the less-well-off of the village.

“Right, let’s get started, then,” I suggested. The longer I stayed out here, the worse my hip would ache. And I still had Mrs. L.’s blocked drain hanging over me, metaphorically speaking. “Have you got anything for me?”

It doesn’t always work, but sometimes a picture of the person I’m looking for will help. Dave handed me a snapshot, taken on a sunny day down by the river. Melanie Porter was a pretty girl, although she’d never make the cover of Vogue, or even Nuts. She had a roundish face, chestnut hair, and large blue eyes. Her smile was a little crooked, which gave her a sympathetic air.

Suddenly I didn’t want to find her. She looked like the sort of girl you hoped your brother would marry.

“There’s this too.” Dave handed me a carrier bag with a cardigan in it. “She was wearing it at work, the day she disappeared.”

“I’m not a bloody sniffer dog.” I took it anyway, in case it had some vibes for me. I pointedly didn’t sniff it. I didn’t feel any vibes, either. It was just a plain, slightly bobbly cardie.

“Oh, bloody hell—how did he find out about this?”

I looked up from the photo to see Dave glaring at a tall, blond figure striding our way across the common. The new guy was big in a totally different way to Dave—his shoulders were broad, his legs were long and lean, and the bulk of his chest wasn’t all due to the body warmer he was wearing over a thick sweater. Well, it was a bit nippy up here, as I was finding to my cost. I gave my hip another rub.

There was something vaguely familiar about the bloke. “Who is he?”

“Private bloody investigator. Hired by our girl’s mum and dad. Private bloody pain in the bum, if you ask me. Ex-copper, couldn’t hack it, so left to go private.” He gave me a speculative look. “Course, you might get on all right with him. He’s one of your lot, not that you’d know it to look at him.”

“What, a plumber?” I asked innocently.

“Piss off. And he’s not a bloody psychic either. He’s queer, all right? And if I catch you two canoodling on police time, I’m taking pictures and bunging them on the internet.”

“I’ll try and control my raging homo desires,” I said as dryly as I could. “I’ve managed to keep my hands off you all these years, haven’t I?” I added to wind him up.

Dave shuddered. I wasn’t offended. I was too busy fighting off a shudder myself. Dave’s a great bloke, and I love him dearly, but not like that. Dear God, never like that.

I had to admit I wouldn’t mind a bit of canoodling where the PI was concerned. Dave’s comment about his sexuality had piqued my interest, no doubt about it. As he approached, the sense of familiarity deepened, and I wondered if I’d seen him around somewhere. I was fairly sure we’d never hooked up or anything embarrassing like that. This guy was way out of my league—with a body like that, and a square-jawed, classically handsome face above it, he could take his pick, and he looked like he knew it too.

He nodded at Dave as he got up to where we were standing. “Southgate.”

Dave didn’t so much nod as curl his lip. “Morrison.”

And it hit me where I knew him from. It was all I could do not to stagger back, winded from the blow.

Morrison. Phil Morrison.

The last time I’d seen him, we’d still been at school. It wasn’t a time I looked back on with a nostalgic, rosy glow. My last name’s Paretski, a legacy of my great-grandma’s Polish stepdad, so naturally enough I was known for most of my school life as Parrotski. With the occasional Parrot-face or Polly thrown in for variety. I didn’t exactly like it, but I couldn’t say it really bothered me either. Although I did feel a bit envious of my older brother for having managed to get away with plain old Ski as a nickname.

Then Phil Morrison caught me looking at him in the changing room after PE—well, who wouldn’t look? He was the fittest lad in the school: tall, blond, athletic—and he came up with the bright idea of calling me Poofski.

It caught on instantly. Soon, hardly a day went by without a joke at my expense. Games lessons were the worst. “Don’t let Poofski follow you into the shower!” was a gag that never seemed to get old. My maths teacher, Mr. Collymore, even called me it once. I mean, I’m sure it was a genuine slip of the tongue, and he apologised afterwards, but they were laughing about that one in the classroom for days.

For all I know, they laughed about it in the staff room too.

And now he was here. Against all laws of probability or even human decency, apparently queer. And I was supposed to get used to it?

Morrison must have noticed my reaction, as he looked at me with his eyes narrowed. Suddenly, his face cleared, and a half smile flickered across his lips. “Parrotski,” he said with grim satisfaction.

Well, it could have been worse. And I was long over being intimidated by him. “That’s Paretski, if you don’t mind,” I snapped.

“You’ve changed a bit,” he said cryptically.

“So have you.” I tried to inject as much meaning as I could into those three words. I wanted him to know I knew his little secret. I wanted him to feel like the bloody hypocrite he was.

Zero reaction. Either it didn’t work, or more likely, he just didn’t give a monkey’s what I thought about him.

Dave huffed impatiently. “If you don’t mind me interrupting this touching reunion, we do have a body to look for. And Morrison? Unless you’re here to hand deliver a map drawn by the murderer, your services are not required. This is an official police investigation, not a bloody free-for-all.”

Morrison raised an eyebrow. “Oh? When did you join the force, Parrot—Paretski? Good thing for you they dropped the height restrictions.”

My jaw tensed. “I’m just here as a consultant.”

“Know a lot about hiding bodies, do you?” God, I’d forgotten just how much his snide tone got up my nose.

“Used to think about it all the time back in school,” I said pointedly.

“Girls!” Dave broke in with an exasperated shout.

We both whirled to look at him, probably with identical hangdog expressions. “Sorry, Dave,” I said, to establish myself firmly as the reasonable one. “Time to get started?”

“Too bloody right. Come on. And Morrison? If I find you trampling on the evidence, you’ll be cooling your heels in jail, understood? As soon as we find anything—if we find anything—the family will be informed.” Dave grabbed my elbow and more or less hustled me into the trees. We stopped once we were out of sight of the grassland. “Right—do your stuff.”

I sighed. “What, after all that?”

“Oh, come off it, Tom. Don’t play the prima donna with me, now. What was all that with you and Morrison, anyway? The short version, please. Young love gone bad?”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” I warned. “Not unless you fancy pulling him in on a charge of assaulting an officer. We went to school together, that’s all. We weren’t exactly friends.”

I jumped as a hand like a bag full of sausages clapped me briefly on the shoulder. “School bully, was he? I know his type. All bluster and no bloody bollocks.”

Phil Morrison had bollocks, all right. I remembered that from the school showers. You might say I’d made something of a study of the subject. Didn’t think Dave would appreciate me mentioning it, though. I took a deep breath, and tried to clear my mind.

Phil Morrison’s bollocks kept creeping back in there. Sod it. “You want to give me that picture again?” I asked.

Thirty seconds staring at Melanie’s pretty, kind face soon got my mind out of the gutter. “Right. Okay.” I handed it back and closed my eyes. Could I hear something? Feel it tugging at me? I turned around slowly, trying to judge where the pull was coming from. There. I stepped forward, remembering in time to open my eyes before I walked into a tree.

Dave didn’t say anything, and neither did I. We just followed the line I’d sensed. My work boots soon picked up a thick coating of mulched-up leaves, stuck on with mud. On a crisp, frosty morning, this might be a pleasant place for a walk, but right now it was just soggy and dirty. It even smelled damp. Every now and then a twig that had somehow managed to escape getting soaked through would snap loudly under my foot, but more often I’d put my boot in a muddy patch and have to pull it free with a squelch. Brambles snagged my jeans and clutched at my hair.

As the pull got stronger, I sped up. Dave started puffing a bit and occasionally cursing, probably at the mess the mud was making of his shoes. I forced myself to slow down, but it was nagging at me, and I found my pace quickening again.

It wasn’t Melanie’s voice. I don’t see ghosts—at least, I don’t think I do. The girl in the park when I was a kid had seemed like a spirit, but I think it was just the way my child’s brain interpreted things. These days, I just feel a pull, a sense of something hidden, of something not-right. It’s like . . . I’ve never taken drugs—too much weird stuff going on in my head as it is—but I imagine it’s like the pull a hopeless addict feels towards the next fix. Only without the high when I finally give in to it.

Fortunately, I usually only feel it when I’m actively listening—I know you can’t listen for a feeling, but language really isn’t accurate for this sort of thing—or I’d probably go stark raving mad. After all, when you think about it, the average household has six to a dozen things hidden in it. The wife’s saving-up-to-leave-him secret piggy bank; the teenage son’s porn; his dad’s porn; these days, quite often, his mum’s porn. And don’t get me started on the subject of sex toys . . .

I’d veered off course, I realised. Feeling guilty, I wrenched my mind back to the matter in hand. Where had she gone . . .? Dave started to say something, so I held up a hand to shush him.

There. I stepped forward.

When you’re twenty-nine and you find a body, as I said earlier, you don’t get to go blubbing for your mother. You get Dave clapping you on the shoulder and heaving a resigned sigh, while the other police officers throw you suspicious looks. Nobody shields you from the sight as they shine their torches into the bushes and light up the mess some bastard made of a young woman’s skull. Your mind’s well able to interpret the blood, the misshapen dent where the bone pushed into the brain, and your imagination fills in the pain and the terror she must have felt.

And when you walk out of the forest and leave them to it, you find Phil Morrison waiting for you.

It was twilight by now, but he wasn’t exactly easy to overlook. He loomed out of the shadow of the trees like Herne the Hunter on steroids.

“Have they found her, then?” he demanded.

I nodded curtly and went to walk past him. He grabbed my arm.

To say I wasn’t happy was an understatement. I don’t like people grabbing me. Never have. “Oi! Get your bloody hands off me!”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I just want to talk to you, that’s all.” He didn’t let go.

“Why don’t you go and talk to the police? They’re the ones doing all the detecting. I just found her for them.” His eyes narrowed, and I realised I’d given away more than I should have.

“How did you know where she was? Did you see her being dumped here?”

“I didn’t see anything, okay?” I tried to shake off his grip, getting more and more annoyed as he refused to let go. “I just find stuff.”

“Stuff? Like dead people?”

“Yes, okay? Look, for fuck’s sake, I’ve had a hard day and it ended with me cuddling up to a corpse. Will you let go of me or do I have to call one of the coppers over? I’m sure Dave Southgate will be only too happy to pull you in on the trumped-up charge of my choosing.”

He released me, and I rubbed my arm. “So what’s the deal?” he asked. “You know people in low places, they tell you stuff, you tell the police?”

“No. I’m just good at finding stuff, that’s all. It’s a talent. Like dowsing.”

“What, that water-divining crap? Bollocks!”

“Whatever.” I strode off towards my car, pissed off beyond belief to find him walking by my side, his long legs easily keeping up even with my most annoyed pace.

“Come on, what’s the real deal? Look, I’m working for her parents, here. They’re going to be devastated when they find out she’s dead. The least anyone can do is get them some justice.”

Great. Now I felt pissed off and guilty. I rubbed my hip, realised what I was doing and jammed my hand in my jacket pocket where it couldn’t betray me.

When I glanced at Phil, I could tell he’d seen.

“Look, I’m sorry about that,” he said, with an awkward grimace.

“About what?” I asked nastily.

“Well, you know. About the leg.”

“Oh. I see. So making my last year at school a living hell, you’d do all that again, would you?” Bastard.

“Oh, for—” Phil’s hand made some kind of abortive gesture, and he looked up and away from me. “We were kids. That was just joking around.”

“Too bad I never went through with the suicide attempt, then. That’d have made a great punch line.”

“Like you’d have ever killed yourself.”

Right then, I could definitely have killed him. I’d just ripped the bandages off my soul, and all he’d done was sneer and rub salt in the wound. “Oh, and you know me that well, do you? I suppose you’ve been on one of those profiling courses, and now you think you know everything about everyone.”

“No, but I know you. We were at school together, remember?”

We’d reached the car park by now. I fumbled in my pocket for my keys. “Like I could ever forget—”

“Yeah, and I remember you too. You were always so bloody . . .” He threw his hands up, as if clutching for a word. “Self-contained,” he finished.

“‘Self-contained’? What the bloody hell does that mean?”

“Oh, you know. Don’t try and pretend you don’t. Like you didn’t need anyone else. Like we were all just a little bit thick compared to you.”

What? I stared at him, speechless.

“You know,” he continued, “you wouldn’t have got so much stick from everyone if you hadn’t been so bloody standoffish.”

“‘Standoffish’? I was bloody standoffish?” My voice rose so high on the last bit it cracked.

“Yeah. Always looking down your nose at people like me just because we came from the council estate.”

“I— What? Bloody hell, Morrison, have you even noticed you’re a foot taller than I am? If I wanted to look down my nose at you, I’d need a sodding stepladder! I can’t believe you’re even saying that. I was the one nobody liked. Poofski, remember? Because I haven’t bloody well forgotten what it was like, being the butt of your oh-so-funny jokes every . . . bloody . . . day.” The keys in my hand jangled as I punctuated the last few words with jabs of my finger at his overdeveloped chest.

Then I got in my van, slammed the door, and drove home, seething.

I’ve got a little house in Fleetville, which is part of St. Albans but has its own shops and pubs, so it feels like a separate community. It’s way less pretentious than most of the villages around here. It’s pretty ethnically diverse, so the shops are more interesting than in a lot of places—there’s a halal food shop and more takeaways than you could get tired of in a month of not cooking. You see a lot of ladies in saris or headscarves, and blokes in ethnic gear too. Brightens the place up, I always think. I live just off the main road, handy for the shops and the pub. Parking can be a pain—well, it’s St. Albans, isn’t it?—but I can fit the van on the drive, and there’s usually room to park my little Fiesta in front.

At least the cats were pleased to see me, I thought with a smile as I walked in my front door. Merlin wove his slender, black body in and out of my legs ecstatically, and even Arthur deigned to get off his fat, furry arse and pad into the hall to welcome me.

They’re both toms, although most people assume slim, sleek Merlin is a she. Personally, I think he’s gay. He’s always rubbing up against Arthur as if he’d like them to be more than just good friends. Fortunately Arthur’s too thick to notice. He’s a big ginger bruiser who’d probably flatten Merlin if he realised he fancied him. Not very metrosexual, old Arthur.

I fed them the dish of the day (lamb with rabbit, yum, yum) and set about rustling myself up some comfort food. A mug of Heinz tomato soup the size of your average bathtub, and hunks of baker’s bread with tangy cheddar cheese melted into it. Lovely. For dessert, I took a couple of ibuprofen. I don’t like popping pills all the time, but my hip was really killing me, and every twinge was a reminder of Phil bloody Morrison. And the accident.

I’d been seventeen when it happened. I’d made the mistake of heading out to the shops on my own. Just as I turned a corner, I ran straight into Phil Morrison and his gang. Literally.

He hadn’t been pleased to see me. “Oi, watch where you’re going—bloody hell, it’s Poofski!”

“He was touching you up, Phil!” That was Wayne Hills, a nasty little shit who did an awful lot of arse-kissing for a rabid homophobe.

“Get him!”

After a greeting like that, there was only one thing to do. Run. When it came to verbal sparring, I liked to think I gave as good as I got, but there were four of them threatening to get very physical, very fast, and they were all bigger than me.

So I ran.

Unfortunately, my talent for knowing where things are didn’t extend to the oncoming car that hit me square on, shattering my pelvis and breaking my leg. With hindsight, it would have been a lot less painful to stand my ground and take the beating they’d threatened. As violent thugs went, Phil and his gang were strictly minor league. The car, on the other hand, was a four-by-four. With bull bars on the front.

So I ended up missing my A levels, and I never did go back and take them. My parents were disappointed, but with my older brother a consultant oncologist and my sister a barrister, I suppose they thought on average, they’d done all right by their kids. Either that or they were worn out with the whole thing by then. My sister’s ten years older than me, my brother, twelve—I’m fairly sure my parents thought I was the menopause. I’ve never quite dared ask if they were pleased or not to find out the truth.

The plumbing thing came about more or less by chance, although once I’d thought of it, it seemed like the obvious choice. We’d had a pipe burst under the floor, and after ten minutes idly watching the plumber effing and blinding as he tried to work out where the leak was, I realised I could tell him to the inch. His comment of “Are you trying to do me out of a job, son?” got me thinking.

Anyway, as my dad always says, it’s useful having a plumber in the family. Usually, he says this right before he asks me if I’ll take a look at the drip in the shower.

(At which point I generally say, “Oh, I didn’t realise my brother was visiting, and won’t he mind me staring at him?” Family rituals—you’ve got to love them.)

I put down my mug and scratched Arthur’s chin. He leaned into me and purred—he might look like a bruiser, he might even swagger like one, but he’s just a big softy at heart. Talking of swaggering bruisers . . . Phil Morrison, a poof. Who’d have thought it?

Of course, it occurred to me, just because Dave had heard Phil was queer didn’t mean he actually was. I smiled to myself. Maybe he’d been the other sort of bent copper, and Dave had got the wrong end of the stick. Now that I could believe.