The sound of the old disk being read took Butcher back to his childhood. The chunter and crunch of the drive was something he didn’t think he had heard since primary school and he had to admit to himself that he was incredibly curious as to what a hip young thing like Cally Cuttler had thought to commit to the disk. At the same time, he reminded himself that it was far more likely to be the secret diaries of a prepubescent or some cheeky porn than it was going to be a solid lead to her current location.

But the explorer window showed that the disk held two files, both showing clear according to his virus checker. One was an Excel file, which he opened first.

It was a list of names. Sixty-eight names in total, in one block of eight, then six blocks of ten each. None of the names was Cally Cuttler or anyone else he had ever heard of. He put the first eight names into Google in different combinations but nothing came up at first glance worth talking about. So he sent the file to the hotel’s business centre for printing and opened the second file. It was just a .TXT and, when it opened, displayed a very, very long string of what looked like nonsense to him at first glance. He examined it closer, though, and could tell that it was some sort of programming language. He had never been a programmer himself, but he’d hung out with a few in his early days at the Int Corps, and the Det had its fair share of nerds. He had been given some fairly basic training on how to identify certain types of coding for evidence-gathering purposes and, if he was going to guess, he would say that this one looked vaguely like examples he had been shown of types of assembly code.

To send it to the printer would’ve meant printing hundreds of pages.

He could send it to BRS for analysis, but if it turned out to be important, he didn’t need them breathing down his neck on this. He supposed, theoretically, he could send it to Cuttler. He didn’t have an email contact for the errant mancer, but he was sure he could prise one out of him if it was relevant to his sister’s disappearance. Still, it was probably more valuable to hold onto the code as collateral in that respect. If he hit a brick wall and needed to keep the fugitive on-side, he’d send him the code. Instead, Butcher created a new Gmail account, set up a Dropbox account using the throwaway email and dumped both the text file and the spreadsheet into it. Then he deleted them both from the floppy drive, pulled it out and tore it apart before tossing it into the bin.

By comparison, Cally’s hard drive was a spectacular mess of media files he didn’t have the right software for, half-finished lyrics, homework for everything from GCSEs onwards, and - ah, motherlode - photographs. There were literally thousands of photos. And he was pleased to see that she had run an email client on her desktop so he had email going back almost to her disappearance. But it was a mess like everything else and he had an appointment to get to. The hard drive would have to wait.

*

In the grim-faced multi-storey Butcher parked the Insignia carefully, double-checked the Browning was in the glove compartment (because walking into a police station when you were wanted for murder was bad enough, but walking in with a loaded pistol was a truly dreadful idea) and ran his hands over his coat lapels. The hotel’s dry-cleaning service had done a decent job of making good the filthy mess in which Emmy had left his suit and the receptionist had barely raised an eyebrow at his dishevelled appearance.

The headquarters of the local constabulary was next to the nearby bus station, with an understated public entrance up a staircase squashed behind a long line of bus stops. Butcher knew he didn’t have to work too hard to keep his cool. No one was supposed to look comfortable walking into a police station unless they worked there.

‘Hi,’ he said to the civilian receptionist. ‘I have an appointment to see Detective Constable Saad Malik at eleven.’

The receptionist checked a computer screen and nodded.

‘I’ll let him know you’re here, if you can just wait over there?’

There were several rows of plastic chairs, bolted to the floor, intermittently occupied by exactly the kind of people Butcher expected to see: some frightened first-timers who could be there as witnesses or suspects and it wouldn’t make them look less uncomfortable; a handful of what looked like more serious offenders, most likely reporting as part of their bail conditions; and the rest dressed in the besuited weariness of the veteran criminal solicitor. He hoped that he looked more like the latter group than the second.

He was there fifteen minutes early, and forty-five minutes later he was still waiting, flicking through the photos from Cally’s hard drive that he had moved to his temporary Gmail cloud drive. Nothing major had leaped out, but he thought whatever DC Malik could tell him might put some of it into context.

‘Greg Parsons?’

Butcher looked up to see a young Asian man in a pale grey suit and dark tie at the security door. He had the tailored good looks of Gen Z, with an expensive haircut, trimmed beard and cheekbone highlights that weren’t as subtle as he probably thought they were.

‘DC Malik?’ he asked, getting up and extending a hand.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ Malik greeted him in an accent that owed more to South London than Merseyside. ‘I had to speak to Mrs Cuttler to confirm your story.’

‘You know I don’t work directly for the family?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘She told me you were a prick who probably ought to be arrested, but that you were definitely looking for Cally so she was happy for me to tell you what I could about the investigation.’

‘Hah!’ laughed Butcher. That was better than he had expected, to be honest. It should have occurred to him that Malik might call Geraldine Cuttler to check his bona fides. Ron must have called her as he'd told him to. ‘Yeah, I probably deserve that. I was a bit more pushy that good professional conduct would normally advise.’

‘It’s one way to get results,’ said Malik, shrugging. ‘Which is more than I’ve got on this one. I’ll be honest, I mostly handed it over to social services in case she turns up in one of the shelters or in hospital, but there’s been no sign of her.’

Malik pushed open the door to an interview room and Butcher paused.

‘Look…’ he said, ‘can we keep this a bit more “off the record”?’

Malik looked at the interview room and the recording equipment on the desk and then back at Butcher.

‘Bad memories?’ he asked.

‘I just… prefer to stay under the radar,’ said Butcher. ‘You must have already checked my record. You know I’m clean.’

‘I know you’ve never been charged with an offence, Mister Parsons,’ said Malik, warily. ‘But OK. There’s a waiting room down the way. I don’t think anyone’s in it right now.’

The waiting room was a typical institutional dump. Cheap soft furnishings in lurid primary colours and a mountain of second-hand plastic kids toys piled up in one corner, with a kitchenette with mugs and a hot water dispenser. Malik offered him tea, which he accepted as he took a seat.

‘Look,’ said Butcher, ‘I’m not here to question your work or your methods. I understand how it is and so does the family.’

‘You don’t work for the family.’

‘I’m not paid by the family, Constable Malik, but I understand where my obligations lie,’ he replied. ‘They’ve been perfectly clear with me that they don’t blame the police for a lack of progress. I have the luxury of being able to focus on this one case and I have a generous budget.’

‘How can I help?’

‘Tell me what you found out and what leads you pursued,’ said Butcher. ‘I promise to keep you informed if I find out anything pertinent. If it became relevant and I could do with some guidance from HOLMES, I’d appreciate it if you would at least consider helping me out.’

HOLMES, the national police database, was the principal asset, other than sheer manpower, that the police had which Butcher might need. Malik handed him a steaming mug of tea and took a seat opposite him.

‘No guarantees,’ he told Butcher, taking a business card from his pocket and passing across. ‘But I’ll take your call.’

‘That’s all I ask.’

‘Look, the case was never a high priority,’ he admitted. ‘We get disappearances of young people in and around the music scene all the time. Most of them are gone for a few days, then they turn up. Some might be missing for a few weeks. Sometimes they’ve just gone on a bender and ended up in someone’s bed with no phone and no money. The worst case scenario that we had one time was when a girl turned up, months later, in a raid on a people trafficking ring in Newcastle. She was locked in a basement with five other girls. Rumour had it they were on their way to Saudi Arabia, but they couldn’t prove that.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

‘But in that case, the girl in question was Ukrainian, only spoke a little English and had only been here a couple of months to begin with,’ he went on. ‘Cally Cuttler was an educated, intelligent girl with a supportive family. The traffickers don’t like that sort because it’s too easy for them to get help if they escape, or to get a message out. It’s generally too risky.’

‘But sometimes people are taken to order,’ Butcher pointed out. ‘If someone specifically wanted to pay enough for an English-speaking brunette musician, it might be worth the risk.’

‘That’s true,’ Malik admitted. ‘But there’s nothing in the chatter to suggest anyone was in the market for someone like Cally. Basically, there’s no evidence to suggest that this happened to her.

‘I spoke to her friends in the city that we could identify. When she came back, it seems like she ended up hanging with a group that wasn’t connected to the music scene, to LIPA or to her other friends in the city. Her friends who still saw her said that her personality changed. She was withdrawn and secretive and spent less and less time on her music.’

‘Drugs,’ said Butcher.

‘That’s what everyone assumed,’ agreed Malik. ‘But no one actually saw her using and there was nothing obvious like track marks or paraphernalia. Still, odds are good that she fell in with the local drugs scene. Now, don’t get me wrong - they’re bad lads and will fuck your shit up if you cross them. But I don’t see Cally trying to muscle into their scene. My best guess is they’ve got her on the game, or she’s someone’s sex pet. I checked the local streetwalkers one time, but no one had seen or heard of her, so I reckon it’s the second.

‘Eventually she’ll end up in hospital and, if he survives, we can swoop in and get her cleaned up and back to her family, but until then…’

‘I get it,’ said Butcher. ‘Not enough time, people or money to track down one little lost girl.’

Malik shrugged.

‘Can you contact the friends you spoke to before? See if they’d be willing to talk to me, too?’

*

Malik rang around and made a couple of appointments for Butcher. He pointed out that, if those appointments went well, it was up to them to decide whether to give him anyone else’s contact details. If he wanted anything else from Malik, Butcher should call in if he makes any progress.

So Butcher found himself driving out to Fairfield and knocking at the door of the kind of two-up-two-down terraced house you found all over England. The telephone wires, satellite dish and uPVC window panes were at jarring odds with the Victorian red brick, but the peeling whitewash on the render already gave it a rundown look that was only reinforced by the repair work on the front door, where someone had visibly kicked the frame in at least once.

Craig was a LIPA graduate who had been friends with Cally before she had gone to London. A jobbing actor, with a sparse frame and disproportionate beard, he got by on bit parts and voice roles, he told Butcher. But Cally had stayed with him, in this house, for three weeks after she’d come back to Liverpool.

‘She had a decent set of gigs lined up,’ said Craig. ‘It was solid income and she was paying half my rent to sleep on my sofa! I thought if she kept on like that, I could persuade her to go halves with me on a two-bed apartment and she could have a bed of her own.’

‘You two didn’t -?’ Butcher started to ask, balancing on the edge of the armchair in the house’s tiny sitting room - what he imagined it’s first occupants, two hundred years ago, might have called a “parlour”.

‘Oh, God, no,’ laughed Craig, anticipating the question. ‘Strictly platonic. Not even friends with benefits, yeah? Cally was ace.’

‘Ace?’ he asked. From the context and tone of voice, he guessed that Craig didn't mean she was particularly good.

‘Asexual,’ explained Craig. ‘She didn’t do sex at all, with anyone. It just… It wasn’t her thing.’

‘So she had good gigs?’

‘So, yeah,’ he said. ‘She had a few lined up. But then she ditched on one and cancelled the rest. I was a bit pissed at her about that, to be honest. I was in a rough patch, work-wise, and I needed the money. We had a bit of a falling out and she left.’

‘Was that the last time you saw her?’

‘No way!’ he replied, hands waving. ‘God, if I’d left it like that with her and never seen her again, I’d’ve been gutted. No, she went and stayed with Sabina. I took some stuff around and apologised and we were cool. I saw her two, maybe three times after that. Just, like, at the pub and that.’

*

‘She was totally not doing drugs,’ insisted Sabina. Her place was a step up from Craig’s: a large semi-detached that she shared with two other girls. But Butcher got the impression that mummy and daddy were paying the rent - or possibly owned the place. It would explain why Sabina was happy to let her friend sofa surf for free.

‘What makes you so sure?’ asked Butcher, flicking through photos on Sabina’s phone as she spoke. She had already put all of the photos she had of Cally into one folder. She had spent a month visiting venues and gigs around Liverpool, showing them to people to see if anyone had seen her, but without any success. ‘You said yourself that she was withdrawn and secretive. She was out at all hours and avoided company.’

They were in the kitchen: small, but well fitted with a basic Ikea finish in gloss grey and enough room for a small table, where Butcher sat, nursing his third cup of tea since he’d left the hotel. Sabina was a short girl with an impressive afro, and Butcher thought she still had a Jamaican lilt beneath her public school intonations. She sat up on the kitchen counter waving her espresso as she spoke.

‘Look, you’re not police, right?’ said Sabina. ‘I do not need this getting back to my Dad, yeah?’

‘I am definitely not police, Sabina,’ Butched promised. ‘Nothing you say to me is on the record. I’m just looking for Cally.’

‘Once in a while, I like a bit of a pick-me-up, yeah?’ she said, her voice lowered as if imparting great secrets. ‘Just, like, a line or two. And I’m a good host, so I was just cutting up and I offered Cally a line and she was, like, absolutely no way, no how.’

‘No heroin? No E? No grass?’

‘No way!’ cried Sabina. ‘And if she’s not into a little coke now and then, there’s no way she’s going to be shooting up that shit on the down-low! She was into something way different.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, God, I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘She wouldn’t look at me. Started wearing big, baggy clothes and gloves. Changed her hair colour. That kind of thing. If she’d just stayed a bit longer, I know I’d’ve got it out of her. I caught her crying the day before she left. She said it was nothing and refused to talk about it. But she definitely wanted me to catch her crying, you know? She wanted me to know something was wrong. She just… needed time to talk about it.’

‘Did she leave anything behind when she left? Anything to suggest she meant to come back or any clue to where she’d been?’

‘No,’ said Sabina. ‘She packed the lot and left. Didn’t leave a thing.’

‘Can you email me those photos? Or share them with me over Google?’ he asked her, handing her phone back. ‘You’ve got timestamps and location data on all of these. This could be absolutely vital to putting together a timeline to help track her movements, spot any patterns that could point me towards what she was involved in.’

She nodded and while Butcher finished his tea, she shared the folder with his throwaway account. While she was doing that, he remembered something Malik had said and brought it up.

'The police said she was hanging with a different crowd - someone other than her music and LIPA friends. Do you know who that might have been?'

'I mean, not really,' said Sabina after a long think. 'It's not like we really hung out after she quit gigging, except when she was in the house. She, like, went out, yeah? But she never said where or with who. And it wasn't, like, all the time either. Sometimes she just stayed in bed for days. But wait... I did see her talking with a guy, one time. She was still busking and I swung past to say hi, on my way back from shopping, yeah? She was off her pitch, talking to a guy in a hoodie. Big guy, like, proper shoulders. But I didn't get a good look at him. He just walked off and Cally was back on her pitch and I said hi and that was it.'

'You didn't ask?'

'Oh, god, probably,' she laughed. 'But if I did, Cally brushed it off, you know? I don't even know anymore.'

He could see the upload was done, so he thanked her, made his apologies and headed back towards where he’d parked the car. If Cally had packed up before she left, and Sabina hadn’t been charging her anything to stay, then it meant that Cally must have had somewhere else to go - somewhere connected to whatever secretive thing she’d been involved with. It sounded cult-y to Butcher. But those nutters usually couldn’t shut up about whatever they were involved with - especially when it came to rich friends who could be pulled in along with whatever trust fund was underpinning their lifestyle.

And why leave right then?

Butcher through Sabina had probably been right that Cally had wanted Sabina to know. The behaviour stacked up. Stay with a sympathetic and perceptive friend and let the signs hang out there until they straight up force you to spill whatever dreadful secret you’re holding onto. That way, you avoided blame and whatever guilt came with it.

So she felt guilty about whatever it was she had been involved in. She wanted help. She wanted a way out but, at the last minute, she had, instead, turned and plunged herself right into the middle of whatever it was.

Butcher had to agree with Sabina that it didn’t sound like drugs. Addicts didn’t refuse a free hit, even if it wasn’t their poison of choice. And that was information that Malik wouldn’t have had.

Well, sometimes it does help to not be police, he admitted.

The timeline that Craig and Sabina had given him would help make some sense of Cally’s photographs, now. So he decided to head back to the hotel and give them a deeper look.

*

Outside the Canning Place police headquarters, Malik waited as the phone number he had called rang out and beeped him into the voicemail.

‘It’s DC Malik, sir,’ he said. ‘You asked me to let you know if anyone decided to try to re-prioritize your sister’s case, so I’m just giving you a heads-up. There’s a man called Parsons. He’s a private investigator and he’s been hired to look for Cally. Geraldine vouched for him, so I gave him the case summary and pushed him towards the drugs angle. But I thought you’d like to know, just in case.

‘You can call me on this number if, you know, you want me to help him come to the right conclusions.’

He hung up and tucked the phone back into his jacket pocket, but even as he started to head back into the office, it buzzed and he pulled it out.

Hello, sir,’ he said, with the smile of a man anticipating a nice bonus, ‘that was quick.’

There was a long pause as he listened, punctuating the monologue with occasional confirmatory grunts.

‘That’s not the kind of thing I just do on spec, sir,’ he said eventually, his face serious. He rubbed his cheeks as he considered what had been said. ‘Extra expenses are going to apply…'

There was a long pause as he listened.

'Well, that is the kind of thing I like to hear. You still have the account details? … Good. Well, consider it done.

‘Yes, a pleasure doing business with you, too, sir.’