'So, a big Sunday roast?' Thorne had asked. 'That kind of thing?'

'And a cream tea on the Saturday with a bit of luck.'

'No mooching around in antiques shops.'

'No mooching.'

They stopped, holding their breath as they listened to Alfie coughing in the next room. Thankfully, he stayed asleep.

Thorne adjusted his pillow. Sniffed. 'A decent pub with a toasty fire.'

'I bloody well hope so.'

'And definitely no walking?'

'Only as far as the pub.'

Thorne had grunted cautiously and pulled Helen closer to him, thinking about it. 'Just the weekend though, right ...?'

Now, on their first night away, a month after those tentative and delicate bedtime negotiations, walking back to their hotel after dinner in a more than decent pub, Tom Thorne decided that he'd got off reasonably lightly. It had taken a good deal of organisation, not to mention the calling in of several favours from sympathetic colleagues, to co-ordinate the holidays they were both due and he knew that Helen had been angling to spend at least a week of it holed up in the Cotswolds.

'It was nice food, wasn't it?' Helen asked.

'Yeah, it was all right.'

She shook her head. 'You miserable old git.'

Thorne could see the sly smile, but had no way of knowing that Helen Weeks too thought she'd had a result. Thorne was not the most adventurous of souls. He was still uncomfortable spending time south of the Thames, so she knew that, given the choice, he would rather stick needles in his eyes than spend precious free time in the countryside. Just hearing the theme tune to The Archers was normally enough to give him the heebie-jeebies.

'Home-made chutney and bloody am-dram,' he'd said once. 'I couldn't care less.'

All things considered, she had decided that a weekend – a long Valentine's Day weekend – was a fair return for the time spent trying to persuade him that it would be good to get out of the city for a few days. A few days on their own, before they'd head off somewhere good and hot for a week; a nice resort with a toddlers' club, where they could really kick back and do sweet FA until they were due back on the Job. The 'no walking' agreement had been a sacrifice she was prepared to make and the somewhat contentious 'mooching' issue had been worth giving ground on. That said, she had her walking boots stashed in the boot of the car and there was a nice-looking antiques shop on the main road. Helen took a gloved hand out of her pocket and put her arm through Thorne's. She felt quietly confident that the four-poster bed that was waiting for them back at the hotel might lead to the reopening of discussions.

'I'll accept the miserable,' Thorne said. 'But less of the old.'

They turned on to the cobbled side street that led to their hotel. Halfway along, a middle-aged woman passed by with a spaniel that appeared to be feeling the cold every bit as much as Thorne and Helen were. Thorne smiled at the woman and she immediately looked away.

'See that?' Thorne shook his head. 'I thought they were supposed to be friendlier in the countryside. I've met serial killers who were friendlier than that. Sour-faced old bag.'

'You probably scared her,' Helen said. 'You've got a scary face.'

'What?'

'If someone doesn't know you, that's all I'm saying.'

'Great,' Thorne said. 'So, that's miserable, old and scary.'

Helen was grinning as Thorne stepped ahead of her and shouldered the front door of the hotel open. 'Those are your good qualities.'

Inside, Thorne smiled at the teenage girl behind the reception desk, but did not get a great deal more in return than he'd got from the old woman with the dog. He shrugged and nodded towards the small lounge bar. 'Quick one before bed?'

'I think we should head up,' Helen said. 'Maybe have a quick one in bed.'

'Oh ... '

'Or a slow one.'

Thorne's hand moved instinctively to his gut. He was suddenly regretting the decision to eat dessert. 'You might need to give me twenty minutes.'

'Lightweight.'

'Fifteen, then. But you'll have to do all the work.'

Helen walked towards the stairs and, as Thorne turned to follow her, he caught the eye of the girl behind the desk. He guessed that she had overheard, as she had suddenly managed to find a smile from somewhere.

Thorne was in the bathroom when Helen called him. He was brushing his teeth, smiling at the orderly way in which Helen had laid out the contents of her washbag, replacing the range of complimentary toiletries that had already been secreted in her suitcase.

'Tom ... '

He walked back into the bedroom, still brushing. He spattered his Hank Williams T-shirt with toothpaste as he managed a muffled 'What?'

Helen was sitting on a padded trunk at the end of the bed. She nodded towards the TV. 'They've made an arrest.'

They had been following the story for the past three weeks, since the first girl had gone missing. It had all but slipped from the front pages, had no longer been the lead item on the TV news, until the previous day when a second girl had disappeared. This time the missing teenager had been seen getting into a car and suddenly the media were interested again.

Thorne walked quickly back into the bathroom, rinsed and spat. He rejoined Helen, sat next to her as she pointed the remote and turned the volume up.

'It was always on the cards,' Thorne said.

Helen would have been keenly monitoring such an investigation anyway, of course. As a police officer who worked on a child abuse investigation team. As someone all too aware of the suffering that missing persons cases wrought among those left waiting and hoping.

As a parent.

This one was different though.

On the screen, a young reporter in a smart coat and thick scarf talked directly to camera. She spoke, suitably grim-faced, yet evidently excited at breaking the news about this latest 'significant development'. Behind her, almost certainly gathered together by the film crew for effect, a small group of locals jostled for position in a market square that Helen Weeks knew well.

This was the town in which she had grown up.

The reporter continued, talking over the same video package that had run the night before: a ragged line of officers in high-vis jackets moving slowly across a dark field; a distraught-looking couple being comforted by relatives; a different but equally distressed couple being bundled through a scrum of journalists brandishing cameras and microphones. The reporter said that, according to sources close to the investigation, a local man in his thirties had been identified as the suspect currently in custody. She gave the man's name. She said it again, nice and slowly. 'Police,' she said, 'have refused to confirm or deny that Stephen Bates is the man they are holding.'

'Ouch,' Thorne said. 'Right now there's a senior investigating officer ripping some gobshite a new arsehole.'

'Leak could have come from anywhere,' Helen said.

'Not good though, is it?'

'Not a lot anyone can do, not there. Somebody knows somebody who saw him taken to the station, whatever.' Her eyes had not left the screen. 'It's not an easy place to keep secrets.'

Thorne was about to say something else, but Helen shushed him. A photograph filled the screen and the reporter proudly announced that this picture of the man now being questioned had been acquired exclusively from a source...