couldn’t put into words the sense of unease that was hanging around my shoulders like a cloak. I knew she wouldn’t be that chuffed if we told her our next move was to track down her husband. I knew she had a very clear idea as to how we should run the investigation and poking around, testing the edges of her story, wasn’t it.
‘We need a phone number,’ I said. ‘We need to be able to contact you. We’re out and about for the rest of the day.’
‘Where?’
‘Following up some enquiries on the girlfriend,’ I said.
‘What enquiries?’
That was as far as I’d got. ‘She’s from Huddersfield,’ I improvised. ‘Her parents might be hiding Jack.’
‘I want an address,’ Mrs Wilkins barked down the phone. A pause. Her tone softened. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a difficult time.’
I could feel the tension emanating from her down the telephone line. I raised my eyebrows at Jo. ‘We’ll get back to you as soon as we have something concrete. But we need a number.’
‘What happened to your offices?’
‘Ah.’ I fingered the telephone wire. ‘You’ve been?’
‘The front door is boarded up.’
‘We’re having some work done.’
‘You’ve been burgled. Who by?’
‘Kids. It’s a crime-ridden area. It’s nothing—’
‘What did they take?’
‘Nothing. There’s nothing to take. We have a security system. Nothing of any value is left in the office.’
‘The place looked trashed.’
‘Just kids—’
‘This isn’t happening fast enough,’ she said.
‘Give us a chance.’ I know I sounded petulant. ‘We only started yesterday. We’re making progress,’ I said as I crossed my fingers behind my back. ‘These things don’t solve themselves overnight.’
‘I can’t stay here,’ she said.
‘Where’s here?’ I asked at the same time as Jo said: ‘We went down to the Queens.’
A barely perceptible pause. ‘I had to move,’ she said. ‘I think …’ her voice trailed off and for a moment I suspected that she was holding her hand over the receiver and talking to someone else. When she returned to the phone call, she spoke slower. ‘I think someone’s following me. I’m frightened Jack’s involved in something, something bad.’
‘Who would—?’
‘I’ll give you a number. Got a pen?’
Jo pulled one out of the front pocket of her dungarees, and I took down the number that Mrs Wilkins repeated twice.
‘Ring me on that, two o’clock. I’ve got to go.’
The dial tone sounded before I had chance to say goodbye.
‘Did you buy that?’ I asked Jo.
‘What, that about her being his adopted mother?’
‘Step,’ I said. These distinctions have always mattered to me.
‘She sounded worried,’ said Jo. ‘Why’d you tell her Carly’s parents might be hiding Jack?’
‘She sounded stressed,’ I said, refusing to recognize Jo’s look of bewilderment. I glanced at the biro marks on my left forearm. ‘Why would anyone be following her?’
‘You made it sound like we’d produce her son in time for lunch.’
‘I had to tell her something.’
‘We’ve got more chance of finding Madeleine McCann.’
‘You don’t know that. His dad might know something.’
I wasn’t convinced. All we were beginning to discover was how little we actually knew.
The next thing was to see if I could get the number for Mr Wilkins. I knew this was going to get us into deep trouble with our own client, but I needed some facts confirmed.
‘Where’s the form?’
The filing system, such as we’d had, had been three lever arch files that stood on top of the cupboard that housed the electricity metre. All those files had been torn apart and discarded in the middle of the room and then I’d bagged their ripped contents into bin liners as part of the tidy up process the night before. ‘Bollocks.’
I prised open the knot of one of the bin bags, the one that crunched, and sifted through the papers in there, but I couldn’t find the form.
‘It’s not here.’ I upended the only other bin liners that contained paper. The rest were full of the remains of Jack’s stuff.
Jo came over to help me search and we went wordlessly through the papers, now strewn all over the floor, one more time. And guess what? It wasn’t there. There wasn’t a single piece of it in evidence.
‘That’s weird. They wouldn’t take the form, would they?’
‘They might. Whoever burgled the office is looking for Jack. Maybe they’re on their way round to his dad’s house too.’
‘Give me your phone.’
Jo passed it across, and I googled ‘Wilkins + Manchester’: 800,000 results. The first twenty or so pages were about Ray Wilkins, a defender for Manchester United. Apparently.
‘This is hopeless. We’ll have to go there.’
‘Where?’ said Jo.
‘Manchester.’
‘Why Manchester?’
‘Mrs Wilkins said she was from Manchester.’
‘Only we can’t believe a fucking word she tells us,’ said Jo.
‘Didn’t Carly say he was a car salesman?’ I added ‘cars’ to the search bar, which narrowed the results to a mere 65,000.
I stared at what remained of Jack’s possessions, scattered on the floor. ‘The thing from Mancini – he’s a Man City fan.’
‘There’s people living in Japan that support Man City.’
‘You’re forgetting our clue.’ I pounced on the wallet.
Jo stared at me. ‘We have a clue?’
I opened it up and rang a finger through the various pockets. Nothing there. I rummaged through the papers on
