The Glavenford Police Headquarters was a building designed to communicate authority and achieved only its opposite. It had been constructed in the early 1980s, during a brief period of civic optimism that had since curdled into the usual municipal resignation. The architect had favoured concrete and glass in proportions that suggested a fortress, but years of budget cuts and deferred maintenance had reduced the effect to something more akin to a multi-storey car park with aspirations. The windows were grey with grime. The concrete facade was stained with the dark trails of rainwater that had been running down the same channels for a quarter of a century. A flag of the Avalon Federation drooped from a pole above the entrance, its colours faded to pastels by the northern sun.
Leo and Mara arrived at nine o'clock precisely. They had spent the night in a guesthouse on the outskirts of Glavenford, a place called The Traveller's Rest that smelled of boiled cabbage and lavender air freshener. Neither of them had slept. Leo had lain awake listening to the gurgle of the plumbing and the distant rumble of lorries on the bypass, turning Holm's words over in his mind until they had lost all texture. Mara had sat by the window, watching the sodium glow of the streetlamps, her folder open on her lap. She had not spoken since they left Cairnwick, and Leo had learned, over the decade of their shared grief, to recognise her silences as a form of concentration rather than withdrawal. She was assembling something in her mind, piece by piece, and he knew better than to interrupt.
The desk sergeant was a young woman with a severe fringe and the weary courtesy of someone who had been dealing with the public for just long enough to have lost her illusions but not long enough to have become indifferent. Leo gave her their names and said they had an appointment with the detective in charge of cold cases. The sergeant checked a clipboard and directed them to a waiting area, a row of moulded plastic chairs bolted to the floor beneath a noticeboard covered in posters about domestic violence and neighbourhood watch. They sat. The chairs were uncomfortable in the way that all institutional furniture is uncomfortable, as if comfort were a luxury the state could not afford to provide.
Twenty minutes passed. Then the door to the inner offices swung open and a man emerged, walking toward them with the measured gait of someone who had spent a career entering rooms where no one wanted to see him. He was in his early fifties, Leo guessed, with thinning hair the colour of wet sand and a face that had settled into lines of permanent, mild disappointment. He wore a grey suit that had been bought off the rack and had never quite forgiven its owner for the transaction.
“Mr. and Mrs. Vance,” he said. It was not a question. “I'm Detective Inspector Callum Baird. I'm the senior investigating officer for unsolved serious crimes in the northern district. I understand you have information pertaining to the disappearance of your son.”
“We have a witness,” Mara said. She had risen from her chair and was holding the folder against her chest like a shield. “A man named Isaac Holm. He worked with Dorian Clegg at a slaughterhouse in Cairnwick in 1999 and 2000. He heard Clegg confess to taking a boy from the south. He's willing to make a formal statement.”
Baird's expression did not change. He nodded, slowly, and gestured toward the door. “You'd better come through.”
He led them to a small interview room, the kind of room that Leo had seen in countless television dramas but had never expected to enter in real life. It was windowless, lit by a fluorescent strip that buzzed faintly, as if a trapped insect were lodged somewhere behind the diffuser. A table, four chairs, a recording device mounted on the wall. The smell of stale coffee and disinfectant. Baird indicated the chairs and they sat, Leo and Mara on one side of the table, Baird on the other.
“Isaac Holm,” Baird said, taking a notebook from his jacket pocket. “Cairnwick Meats. And he says Clegg confessed to him nine years ago. Is that correct?”
Mara opened her folder and withdrew the sheet of paper that Holm had signed the previous afternoon. She slid it across the table. Baird picked it up and read it, his lips moving slightly as he worked through the cramped handwriting. When he finished, he set the paper down and looked at them with an expression that Leo could not read.
“This is a serious allegation,” Baird said. “If it's true, it's the first significant lead in your son's case since 1998. But I have to ask you some difficult questions. You understand that.”
“We understand,” Leo said.
“This man Holm. You went to see him on the basis of an anonymous letter. You don't know who sent the letter. You don't know what their motives might be. And Holm himself—you said he was disciplined for drinking on the job. He admitted to you that he was afraid of Clegg. He's had this information for nine years and chose not to come forward until two strangers from the south appeared at his door. Is that accurate?”
“Yes,” Mara said. “But that doesn't mean he's lying.”
“No, it doesn't,” Baird agreed. “But it does mean we have to proceed carefully. A statement from a reluctant witness, nine years after the fact, based on a drunken conversation—that's not a strong foundation for a prosecution. Especially not against a man who's already been investigated and released.”
Leo felt a cold tendril of something that might have been rage uncoil in his chest. “Clegg was released because you didn't have enough evidence. Now you have more.”
“We have a statement,” Baird said. “That's not evidence of a crime. It's evidence that a man said something while intoxicated. Clegg's defence would tear it apart. 'The witness was drinking himself. The witness had a grudge against the defendant. The witness waited nine years to come forward.' I'm not saying this to discourage you. I'm saying it because you need to understand what we're dealing with.”
Mara leaned forward. Her voice was very quiet. “We've been dealing with it for ten years, Inspector. We understand exactly what we're dealing with. We understand that the button we found in our garden wasn't enough. We understand that the campsite in the woods wasn't enough. We understand that a known predator being questioned over another missing girl wasn't enough. We have spent a decade being told that what we have isn't enough. And now we have a witness who heard our son's abductor confess, and you're telling us that still isn't enough.”
Baird held her gaze. He did not look away, and Leo felt a grudging respect for the man. Most people could not meet Mara's eyes when she spoke about Samuel. The intensity was too much, the grief too raw. Baird, at least, was willing to face it.
“I'm not telling you it isn't enough,” Baird said. “I'm telling you we need to build a case, and building a case takes time. It takes corroboration. Holm says Clegg was working at the slaughterhouse in February 2000. We can check the employment records. We can trace Clegg's movements before and after. We can look for other witnesses who might have heard him say something similar. And we can bring Clegg in for questioning, on the basis of this new information.”
“Questioning,” Leo said. The word tasted bitter in his mouth. “He's been questioned before.”
“Yes, he has. And he's walked away every time, because we didn't have enough to hold him. But questioning can yield results, even with experienced offenders. People slip. They contradict themselves. They say things they didn't mean to say. And sometimes, the mere fact of being questioned again, after all these years, is enough to shake something loose.”
Baird paused. He looked down at Holm's statement, then back at the Vances.
“I'm going to be honest with you. The chances of securing a conviction on the basis of what we have now are slim. But they're not zero. And if we can find more—if we can build a chain of evidence that connects Clegg to your son's disappearance—then we have something. But I need you to understand that this process could take months. It could take years. And even then, there are no guarantees.”
“We're familiar with the lack of guarantees,” Mara said. Her voice had returned to its usual flat register, the one she had developed over the decade of waiting. “What do you need from us?”
Baird closed his notebook. “I need you to let us do our job. I know you've been conducting your own investigation. I've read the file. I know about the trips to Calloway, the interviews, the research. And I understand why you've done it. But now that this is an active inquiry, I need you to step back. Any further contact with witnesses, any independent investigation, could compromise the case. Do you understand what I'm saying?”
Leo understood perfectly. Baird was asking them to return to the paralysis of waiting, the same paralysis they had endured for ten years. He was asking them to hand over the only thing that had given them a sense of agency—their own investigation—and trust the same system that had failed them repeatedly. It was a reasonable request. It was also, Leo thought, impossible to fulfil.
“We understand,” Leo said, before Mara could answer. “We'll cooperate fully.”
Baird studied him for a moment, as if trying to determine whether the words were sincere. Then he nodded and stood.
“I'll have someone take a formal statement from you about your meeting with Holm. After that, you're free to go. I'll be in touch when we have developments.”
The formal statement took another hour. A young constable with acne and a deferential manner typed their account into a computer, pausing frequently to ask for clarification on details that Leo considered irrelevant. When it was done, they signed the printout and were escorted back to the reception area. The desk sergeant gave them a card with a case reference number and a telephone number they could call for updates. Leo put the card in his wallet, where it joined a dozen other cards from a dozen other officials who had promised to keep them informed.
Outside, the morning had turned grey and damp. A thin drizzle was falling, the kind of rain that seemed to hang in the air rather than fall, coating everything in a fine, cold mist. Leo and Mara stood under the concrete awning of the police headquarters, watching the traffic move through the wet streets.
“You lied to him,” Mara said. She was not looking at Leo. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, on the grey buildings and the grey sky and the grey flag drooping from its pole.
“I told him we understood.”
“You told him we'd cooperate. You told him we'd step back. You know we can't do that.”
Leo turned to face her. The rain was beading on the shoulders of her coat, tiny droplets that caught the dull light. “I told him what he needed to hear. If we'd refused, he would have marked us as uncooperative. He might have stopped sharing information. This way, we maintain access. We maintain the appearance of compliance. What we actually do is a different matter.”
Mara was silent for a moment. Then she nodded, a small, almost imperceptible movement. “We need to find out who sent the letter.”
“Yes.”
“And we need to find out if there are other witnesses. Other people Clegg talked to. Men he worked with. Women he knew. Someone who saw something, heard something, suspected something.”
“Yes.”
“And we need to find Clegg himself. Baird will take weeks just to get the employment records from Cairnwick Meats. He'll take months to trace Clegg's movements. We don't have months. We've already lost ten years.”
Leo did not argue. The law, he had learned, moved at its own pace, a pace that bore no relationship to the urgency of grief. The law was a machine for producing outcomes that were legally correct but temporally indifferent. It did not care that every day of delay was a day of suffering for the people who waited. It did not care that Samuel's parents were growing older, that their hair was greying, that the strength they needed to sustain their search was finite. The law cared about procedure, about chain of custody, about the admissibility of evidence and the rights of the accused. The law was, in its own way, a kind of narcissist, endlessly absorbed in its own reflection.
They walked to the car. The drizzle had intensified into a proper rain now, the drops fat and cold against their faces. Leo unlocked the doors and they climbed in, the seats damp from the moisture that had seeped through the window seals. He started the engine and turned on the heater, and for a while they sat in silence, watching the rain streak the windscreen.
“There's a public records office in Halvergate,” Mara said finally. “Birth certificates, marriage licences, death certificates. If Clegg has family anywhere in the Federation, they'll be listed there. Parents. Siblings. He might have a mother who's still alive. He might have brothers or sisters who know where he is.”
“That's a lot of records to search. Clegg isn't an uncommon name.”
“Then we start with what we know. His date of birth. His mother's maiden name. The town where he was born—Brimswater. We narrow the search. We find his family. And then we find him.”
Leo put the car in gear and pulled out of the car park. The streets of Glavenford slid past, grey and wet, the buildings hunched against the rain like old men waiting for a bus that would never arrive. He thought about what they were planning. It was, in every sense that mattered, a violation of Baird's instructions. It was also the only thing that had kept them alive for the past decade: the conviction that they could do something, that their actions mattered, that the search for Samuel was not yet over.
“Halvergate is four hours south,” he said. “We could be there by evening.”
Mara turned to look at him. The expression on her face was one he had not seen in years. It was not hope, exactly. It was something closer to determination, hardened and tempered by everything they had endured. “Then we go to Halvergate,” she said.
Leo pressed the accelerator, and the car moved into the grey flow of traffic heading south. Behind them, the police headquarters receded into the rain, its concrete bulk dissolving into the mist. And somewhere ahead, in the vast, indifferent geography of the Avalon Federation, the records that might lead them to Dorian Clegg were waiting, filed away in the quiet darkness of a government archive, as patient and as silent as the years themselves.
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