The child seemed completely at ease in the car, smiling happily out of the window, but once inside the police station, it proved impossible to prize her away from her rescuer. She locked her arms about the elderly woman's neck, hiding her face against her shoulder, and clung to kindness as tenaciously as a barnacle clings to a rock. Upon learning that no one had reported a toddler missing, Mr. and Mrs. Green set themselves down with commendable patience and prepared for a long wait.

"I can't understand why her mother hasn't noticed she's gone," said Mrs. Green. "I never allowed my own children out of sight for a minute."

"Maybe she's at work," said the woman police constable who had been detailed to make the inquiries.

"Well, she shouldn't be," said Mr. Green reprovingly. "A child of this age needs her mother with her." He pulled a knowing expression in WPC Griffiths's direction which resolved itself into a series of peculiar facial jerks. "You should get a doctor to examine her. Know what I'm saying? Odd people about these days. Men who should know better. Get my meaning?" He spelled it out. "P-E-do-files. S-E-X criminals. Know what I'm saying?"

"Yes, sir, I know exactly what you're saying, and don't worry"-the WPC tapped her pen on the paper in front of her-"the doctor's at the top of my list. But if you don't mind, we'll take it gently. We've had a lot of dealings with this kind of thing, and we've found the best method is not to rush at it." She turned to the woman with an encouraging smile. "Has she told you her name?"

Mrs. Green shook her head. "She hasn't said a word, dear. To be honest, I'm not sure she can."

"How old do you think she is?"

"Eighteen months, two at the most." She lifted the edge of the child's cotton dress to reveal a pair of disposable training pants. "She's still in nappies, poor little thing."

The WPC thought two years old was an underestimation, and added a year for the purposes of the paperwork. Women like Mrs. Green had reared their children on cloth diapers and, because of the washing involved, had had them potty-trained early. The idea that a three-year-old might still be in nappies was incomprehensible to them.

Not that it made any difference as far as this little girl was concerned. Whether she was eighteen months old, two years old or three, she clearly wasn't talking.

With nothing else to occupy her that Sunday afternoon, the French girl from the Beneteau, who had been an interested observer of Harding's conversations with the Spender brothers, Maggie Jenner, and PC Ingram through the video camera's zoom lens, rowed herself into shore and walked up the steep slope of West Hill to try to work out for herself what the mystery had been about. It wasn't hard to guess that the two boys had found the person who had been winched off the beach by helicopter, nor that the handsome Englishman had reported it to the police for them, but she was curious about why he had reemerged on the hillside half an hour after the police car's departure to retrieve the rucksack he'd abandoned there. She had watched him take out some binoculars and scan the bay and the cliffs before making his way down to the foreshore beyond the boat sheds. She had filmed him for several minutes, staring out to sea, but she was no wiser, having reached his vantage point above Chapman's Pool, than she'd been before, and thoroughly bored, she abandoned the puzzle.

It would be another five days before her father came across the tape and humiliated her in front of the English police...

At six o'clock that evening the Fairline Squadron weighed anchor and motored gently out of Chapman's Pool in the direction of St. Alban's Head. Two languid girls sat on either side of their father on the flying bridge, while his latest companion sat, alone and excluded, on the seat behind them. Once clear of the shallow waters at the mouth of the bay, the boat roared to full power and made off at twenty-five knots on the return journey to Poole, carving a V-shaped wake out of the flat sea behind it.

Heat and alcohol had made them all soporific, particularly the father, who had overexerted himself in his efforts to please his daughters, and after setting the autopilot he appointed the elder one lookout before closing his eyes. He could feel the daggers of his girlfriend's fury carving away at his back, and with a stifled sigh, wished he'd had the sense to leave her behind. She was the latest in a string of what his daughters called his "bimbos," and as usual, they had set out to trample on the fragile shoots of his new relationship. Life, he thought resentfully, was bloody...

"Watch out, Dad!" his daughter screamed in sudden alarm. "We're heading straight for a rock."

The man's heart thudded against his chest as he wrenched the wheel violently, slewing the boat to starboard, and what his daughter had thought was a rock slid past on the port side to dance in the boisterous wake. "I'm too old for all of this," he said shakily, steering his three-hundred-thousand-pound boat back on to course and mentally checking the current state of his insurance. "What the hell was it? It can't have been a rock. There are no rocks out here."

The two youngsters, eyes watering, squinted into the burning sun to make out the black, bobbing shape behind them. "It looks like one of those big oil drums," said the elder.

"Jesus wept," growled her father. "Whoever let that wash overboard deserves to be shot. It could have ripped us open if we'd hit it."

His girlfriend, still twisted around, thought it looked more like an upturned dinghy but was reluctant to voice an opinion for fear of attracting any more of his beastly daughters' derision. She'd had a bucketful already that day and heartily wished she had never agreed to come out with them.

"I bumped into Nick Ingram this morning," said Maggie as she made a pot of tea in her mother's kitchen at Broxton House.

It had been a beautiful room once, lined with old oak dressers, each one piled with copper pans and ornate crockery, and with an eight-foot-long, seventeenth-century refectory table down its middle. Now it was merely drab. Everything worth selling had been sold. Cheap white wall and floor units had replaced the wooden dressers, and a molded plastic excrescence from the garden stood where the monks' table had reigned resplendent. It wouldn't be so bad, Maggie often thought, if the room was cleaned occasionally, but her mother's arthritis and her own terminal exhaustion from trying to make money out of horses meant that cleanliness had long since gone the way of godliness. If God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, then he had a peculiar blind spot when it came to Broxton House. Maggie would have cut her losses and moved away long ago if only her mother had agreed to do the same. Guilt enslaved her. Now she lived in a flat over the stables on the other side of the garden and made only intermittent visits to the house. Its awful emptiness was too obvious a reminder that her mother's poverty was her fault.

"I took Jasper down to Chapman's Pool. A woman drowned in Egmont Bight, and Nick had to guide the helicopter in to pick up the body."

"A tourist, I suppose?"

"Presumably," said Maggie, handing her a cup. "Nick would have said if it was someone local."

"Typical!" snorted Celia crossly. "So Dorset will foot the bill for the helicopter because some inept creature from another county never learned to swim properly. I've a good mind to withhold my taxes."

"You usually do," said Maggie, thinking of the final reminders that littered the desk in the drawing room.

Her mother ignored the remark. "How was Nick?"

"Hot," said her daughter, remembering how red-faced he had been when he returned to the car, "and not in the best of moods." She stared into her tea, screwing up the courage to address the thorny issue of money, or more accurately lack of money, coming into the riding and livery business she ran from the Broxton House stableyard. "We need to talk about the stables," she said abruptly.

Celia refused to be drawn. "You wouldn't have been in a good mood either if you'd just seen a drowned body." Her tone became conversational as a prelude to a series of anecdotes. "I remember seeing one floating down the Ganges when I was staying with my parents in India. It was the summer holidays. I think I was about fifteen at the time. It was a horrible thing, gave me nightmares for weeks. My mother said..."

Maggie stopped listening and fixed instead on a long black hair growing out of her mother's chin which needed plucking. It bristled aggressively as she spoke, like one of Bertie's whiskers, but they'd never had the kind of relationship that meant Maggie could tell her about it. Celia, at sixty-three, was still a good-looking woman with the same dark brown hair as her daughter, touched up from time to time with Harmony color rinses, but the worry of their straitened circumstances had taken a heavy toll in the deep lines around her mouth and eyes.

When she finally drew breath, Maggie reverted immediately to the subject of the stables. "I've been totting up last month's receipts," she said, "and we're about two hundred quid short. Did you let Mary Spencer-Graham off paying again?"

Celia's mouth thinned. "If I did it's my affair."

"No it's not, Ma," said Maggie with a sigh. "We can't afford to be charitable. If Mary doesn't pay, then we can't look after her horse. It's as simple as that. I wouldn't mind so much if we weren't already charging her the absolute minimum, but the fees barely cover Moondust's fodder. You really must be a bit tougher with her."

"How can I? She's almost as badly off as we are, and it's our fault."

Maggie shook her head. "That's not true. She lost ten thousand pounds, peanuts compared with what we lost, but she knows she only has to turn on the waterworks for half a second and you fall for it every time." She gestured impatiently toward the hall and the drawing room beyond. "We can't pay the bills if we don't collect the money, which means we either decide to hand everything over now to Matthew and go and live in a council flat, or you go to him, cap in hand, and beg for some kind of allowance." She gave a helpless shrug at the thought of her brother. "If I believed there was any point in my trying, I would, but we both know he'd slam the door in my face."

Celia gave a mirthless laugh. "What makes you think it would be any different if I tried? That wife of his can't stand me. She'd never agree to keeping her mother-in-law and sister-in-law in what she chooses to call the lap of luxury when her real pleasure in life would be to see us destitute."

"I know," said Maggie guiltily, "and it serves us right. We should never have been rude about her wedding dress."

"It was difficult not to be," said Celia tartly. "The vicar nearly had a heart attack when he saw her."

Her daughter's eyes filled with humor. "It was the greenfly that did it. If there hadn't been a plague of the blasted things the year they got married, and if her wretched veil hadn't collected every single one in a twenty-mile radius while she walked from the church to the reception ... What was it you called her? Something to do with camouflage."

"I didn't call her anything," said Celia with dignity. "I congratulated her for blending so well into her surroundings."

Maggie laughed. "That's right, I remember now. God, you were rude."

"You found it funny at the time," her mother pointed out, easing her bad hip on the chair. "I'll talk to Mary," she promised. "I can probably bear the humiliation of dunning my friends rather better than I can bear the humiliation of begging off Matthew and Ava."

*4*

Physical/psychological assessment of unidentified toddler: "Baby Smith"

Physical: The child's general health is excellent. She is well nourished and well cared for, and is not suffering from any disease or ailment. Blood test indicates minute traces of benzodiazepine (possibly Mogadon) and stronger traces of paracetamol in her system. There is no evidence of past or recent abuse, sexual or physical, although there is some evidence (see below) that she has suffered past, continuing, or recent psychological trauma. The physical evidence suggests that she was separated from her parent/guardian within 3-4 hours of being found-most notably in terms of her overall cleanliness and the fact that she hadn't soiled herself. In addition she showed no signs of dehydration, hypothermia, hunger, or exhaustion, which would have been expected in a child who had been abandoned for any length of time.

Psychological: The child's behavior and social skills are typical of a two-year-old; however, her size and weight suggest she is older. She presents evidence of mild autism, although knowledge of her history is needed to confirm a diagnosis. She is uninterested in other people/children and reacts aggressively when approached by them. She is overly passive, preferring to sit and observe rather than explore her environment. She is unnaturally withdrawn and makes no attempt to communicate verbally, although will use sign language to achieve what she wants. Her hearing is unimpaired, and she listens to everything that's said to her; however, she is selective about which instructions she chooses to obey. As a simple example, she is happy to point to a blue cube when asked, but refuses to pick it up.

While she is unable or unwilling to use words to communicate, she resorts very quickly to screams and tantrums when her wishes are thwarted or when she feels herself stressed. This is particularly evident when strangers enter the room or when voices rise above a monotone. She invariably refuses any sort of physical contact on a first meeting but holds out her arms to be picked up on a second.This would indicate good recognition skills, yet she evinces a strong fear of men and screams in terror whenever they intrude into her space. In the absence of any indication of physical or sexual abuse, this fear may stem from: unfamiliarity with men as a result of being raised in a sheltered, all-female environment; witnessing male aggression against another-e.g. mother or sibling.

Conclusions: In view of the child's backward development and apparent stress-related disorders, she should not be returned to her family/guardians without exhaustive inquiries being made about the nature of the household. It is also imperative that she be placed on the "at risk" register to allow continuous monitoring of her future welfare. I am seriously concerned about the traces of benzodiazepine and paracetamol in her bloodstream. Benzodiazepine (a strong hypnotic) is not recommended for children, and certainly not in conjunction with paracetamol. I suspect the child was sedated but can think of no legitimate reason why this should have been necessary.

N.B. Without knowing more of the child's history, it is difficult to say whether her behavior is due to: (1) autism; (2) psychiatric trauma; (3) taught dependence, which, while leaving her ignorant of her own capabilities, has encouraged her to be consciously manipulative.

Dr. Janet Murray *5*

It bad been a long twenty-four hours, and WPC Sandra Griffiths was yawning as her telephone started to ring again at noon on Monday. She had done several local radio and television interviews to publicize the abandonment of Lily (named after Lilliput, where she was found), but although the response to the programs had been good, not one caller had been able to tell her who the child was. She blamed the weather. Too many people were out in the sunshine; too few watching their sets. She stifled the yawn as she picked up the receiver.

The man at the other end sounded worried. "I'm sorry to bother you," he told her, "but I've just had my mother on the phone. She's incredibly het-up about some toddler who looks like my daughter wandering the streets. I've told her it can't possibly be Hannah, but"-he paused-"well, the thing is we've both tried phoning my wife, and neither of us can get an answer."

Griffiths tucked the receiver under her chin and reached for a pen. This was the twenty-fifth father to phone since the toddler's photograph had been broadcast, and all were estranged from their wives and children. She had no higher hopes of this one than she'd had of the previous twenty-four, but she went through the motions willingly enough. "If you'll answer one or two questions for me, sir, we can establish very quickly whether the little girl is Hannah. May I have your name and address?" "William Sumner, Langton Cottage, Rope Walk, Lymington, Hampshire."

"And do your wife and daughter still live with you, Mr. Sumner?"

"Yes."

Her interest sharpened immediately. "When did you last see them?"

"Four days ago. I'm at a pharmaceutical conference in Liverpool. I spoke to Kate-that's my wife-on Friday night and everything was fine, but my mother's positive this toddler's Hannah. It doesn't make sense though. Mum says she was found in Poole yesterday, but how could Hannah be wandering around Poole on her own when we live in Lymington?"

Griffiths listened to the rising alarm in his voice. "Are you phoning from Liverpool now?" she asked calmly.

"Yes. I'm staying in the Regal, room number two-two-three-five. What should I do? My mother's beside herself with worry. I need to reassure her that everything's all right."

And yourself, too, she thought. "Could you give me a description of Hannah?"

"She looks like her mother," he said rather helplessly. "Blond, blue eyes. She doesn't talk very much. We've been worrying about it, but the doctor says it's just shyness."

"How old is she?"

"She'll be three next month."

The policewoman winced in sympathy as she put the next question, guessing what his answer was going to be. "Does Hannah have a pink cotton dress with smocking on it and a pair of red sandals, Mr. Sumner?"

It took him a second or two to answer. "I don't know about the sandals," he said with difficulty, "but my mother bought her a smocked dress about three months ago. I think it was pink-no, it was pink. Oh God"-his voice broke-"where's Kate?"

She waited a moment. "Did you drive to Liverpool, Mr. Sumner?"

"Yes."

"Do you know roughly how long it will take you to get home?"

"Five hours maybe."

"And where does your mother live?"

"Chichester."

"Then I think you'd better give me her name and address, sir. If the little girl is Hannah, then she can identify her for us. Meantime I'll ask Lymington police to check your house while I make inquiries about your wife here in Poole."

"Mrs. Angela Sumner, Flat Two, The Old Convent, Osborne Crescent, Chichester." His breathing became labored-with tears?-and Griffiths wished herself a million miles away. How she hated the fact that, nine times out of ten, she was the harbinger of bad news. "But there's no way she can get to Poole. She's been in a wheelchair for the last three years and can't drive. If she could, she'd have gone to Lymington to check on Kate and Hannah herself. Can't I make the identification?"

"By all means, if that's what you prefer. The little girl's in the care of a foster family at the moment, and it won't harm her to stay there a few more hours."

"My mother's convinced Hannah's been abused by some man. Is that what's happened? I'd rather know now than later."

"Assuming the little girl is Hannah, then, no, there's no evidence of any sort of physical abuse. She's been thoroughly checked, and the police doctor's satisfied that she hasn't been harmed in any way." She glossed over Dr. Murray's damning psychological assessment. If Lily were indeed Hannah Sumner, then that particular issue would have to be taken up later.

"What kind of inquiries can you make about my wife in Poole?" he asked in bewilderment, reverting to what she'd said previously. "I told you, we live in Lymington."

The hospital kind... "Routine ones, Mr. Sumner. It would help if you could give me her full name and a description of her. Also the type, color, and registration number of her car, and the names of any friends she has in the area."

"Kate Elizabeth Sumner. She's thirty-one, about five feet tall, and blond. The car's a blue Metro, registration F-five-two VXY, but I don't think she knows anyone in Poole. Could she have been taken to hospital? Could something have gone wrong with the pregnancy?"

"It's one of the things I'll be checking, Mr. Sumner." She was flicking through the accident reports on the computer while she was talking to him, but there was no mention of a blue Metro with that registration being involved in a road accident. "Are your wife's parents living? Would they know where she is?"

"No. Her mother died five years ago, and she never knew her father."

"Brothers? Sisters?"

"She hasn't got anyone except me and Hannah." His voice broke again. "What am I going to do? I won't be able to cope if something's happened to her."

"There's no reason to think anything's happened," said Griffiths firmly, while believing the exact opposite. "Do you have a mobile telephone in your car? If so I can keep you up to date as you drive down."

"No."

"Then I suggest you break your journey at the halfway mark to ring from a callbox. I should have news from the Lymington police by then, and with luck I'll be able to set your mind at rest about Kate. And try not to worry, Mr. Sumner," she finished kindly. "It's a long drive from Liverpool, and the important thing is to get yourself back in one piece."

She put through a call to the Lymington police, explaining the details of the case and asking for a check to be made of Sumner's address, then as a matter of routine dialed the Regal Hotel in Liverpool to inquire whether a Mr. William Sumner had been registered in room two-two-three-five since Thursday. "Yes, ma'am," said the receptionist, "but I can't put you through, I'm afraid. He left five minutes ago."

Reluctantly, she started on the list of hospitals.

For various reasons, Nick Ingram had no ambitions to move away from his rural police station, where life revolved around community policing and the hours were predictable. Major cases were handled thirty miles away at County HQ Winfrith, and this left him free to deal with the less glamorous side of policing, which for ninety-five percent of the population was the only side that mattered. People slept sounder in their beds knowing that PC Ingram had zero tolerance for lager louts, vandals, and petty thieves.

Real trouble usually came from outside, and the unidentified woman on the beach looked like being a case in point, he thought, when a call came through from Winfrith at 12:45 p.m. on Monday, 11 August. The coroner's office at Poole had ordered a murder inquiry following the postmortem, and he was told to expect a DI and a DS from headquarters within the hour. A scene-of-crime team had already been dispatched to search the beach at Egmont Bight, but Ingram was requested to stay where he was.

"I don't think they'll find anything," he said helpfully. "I had a bit of a scout around yesterday, but it was fairly obvious the sea had washed her up.

"I suggest you leave that to us," said the unemotional voice at the other end.

Ingram gave a shrug at his end. "What did she die of?"

"Drowning," came the blunt response. "She was thrown into the open sea after an attempt at manual strangulation which failed. The pathologist guesstimates she swam half a mile to try and save herself before she gave up from exhaustion. She was fourteen weeks pregnant, and her killer held her down and raped her before pitching her over the side."

Ingram was shocked. "What sort of man would do that?"

"An unpleasant one. We'll see you in an hour."

Griffiths drew a series of blanks with the name Kate Sumner-there was no record of her at any hospital in Dorset or Hampshire. It was only when she made a routine check through Winfrith to see if there was any information on the whereabouts of a small blond woman, aged thirty-one, who appeared to have gone missing from Lymington within the last forty-eight hours, that the scattered pieces of the jigsaw began to come together.

The two detectives arrived punctually for their meeting with PC Ingram. The sergeant, an arrogant, pushy type with ambitions to join the Met, who clearly believed that every conversation was an opportunity to impress, went down like a lead balloon with his rural colleague, and Ingram was never able afterward to remember his name. He talked in bullet points: "reference a major investigation" in which "speed was of the essence" before the murderer had a chance to get rid of evidence and/or strike again. Local marinas, yacht clubs, and harbors were being "targeted" for information on the victim and/or her killer. Victim identification was the "first priority." They had a possible lead on a missing female, but no one was counting chickens until her husband identified a photograph and/or the body. The second priority was to locate the boat she'd come off and give forensics a chance to strip it top-to-bottom in search of nonintimate samples that would connect it to the body. Give us a suspect, he suggested, and DNA testing would do the rest.

Ingram raised an eyebrow when the monologue came to an end but didn't say anything.

"Did you follow all that?" asked the sergeant impatiently.