‘No, you listen to me: if my six-year-old son isn’t back here in ten minutes I’m going to come round there and rip you a new arsehole, are we clear?’ Ian McLaughlin slapped a hand over the mouthpiece and shouted at his wife to turn that bloody racket down. Then he went back to the idiot on the other end of the phone: ‘Where the hell’s Jamie?’

‘When I got back from the pub they were gone, OK? Catherine’s not here either … maybe she took the boys for a walk?’

‘A walk? It’s pissing down, pitch black, freezing cold—’

‘What? What’s wrong?’ Sharon stood at the door to the living room, wearing the witch costume she’d bought from Woolworths. The one that hid her pregnant bulge and made her breasts look enormous.

Ian grunted, not bothering to cover the phone this time. ‘It’s that moron Davidson: he’s lost Jamie.’

‘Jamie’s missing?’ Sharon clapped a hand to her mouth, stifling the shriek. Always overreacting, just like her bloody mother.

‘I never said that! I didn’t say he was lost, I just—’

‘If we’re late for this bloody party, I’m personally going to see to it that—’

The doorbell: loud and insistent.

‘—your life is going to be—’

The doorbell again.

‘For God’s sake, Sharon, answer the bloody door! I’m on the phone …’

There was a clunk and a rattle as Sharon finally did what she was told, and then she shrieked again. ‘Jamie! Oh Jamie, we were so worried!’

Ian stopped mid-rant, staring at the soggy tableau on the top step: Jamie and his best friend Richard Davidson, holding hands with some idiot in a Halloween costume. ‘About bloody time,’ said Ian, slamming the phone down. ‘I told you to be home by five!’ The two small boys looked wide-eyed and frightened. And so they bloody should be. ‘Where the hell have you two been?’

No reply. Typical. And look at the time … ‘Jamie!’ Ian hooked his thumb in the direction of the stairs. ‘Get your backside up there and get changed. If you’re not a Viking in three minutes you’re going to the party as a kid in his vest and pants.’

Jamie cast a worried look at his partner in crime, then up at the stranger on the doorstep – the one wearing the blood-stained butcher’s apron and Margaret Thatcher fright mask – before slinking up to his room, taking Richard with him.

Great, now they’d have to drop the little brat off at his parents’ house.

Today was turning into a complete nightmare.

20 YEARS LATER

1

Detective Sergeant Logan McRae winced his way across the dark quayside trying not to scald his fingers, making for a scarred offshore container pinned in the harsh glow of police spotlights. The thing was about the size of a domestic bathroom – dented and battered from years of being shipped out to oilrigs

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