Of course, whenever they need to verify anything online, they call in the resident IT guy. Happy I could do anything to help, I set to working down their list as fast as I could. During their car ride, I managed to track down the man in the picture as Clarissa’s father, and I won Peter a fiver by discovering he’d bought a three-bedroom house in Slough a few months ago. I’m not sure if it was much of a victory, though, going by the pensive silence in the car.

“We’ll be headed to the station after lunch.” She likes giving me semi-specific time frames, made her feel a little bit like a real boss. “I want a file with all the ways we can contact them when we do.”

“Got it.” It was a good thing we were video calling, because I could see her hesitate as my hand hovered over the end call button.

“Look into Chase’s dad, too. See if he has a record.”

Peter disconnected the call.

“You’re still on that?”

She shrugged. “I wanna be proven wrong, but-”

“But you admit you’re biased?” He ached to reach out to her, and she could probably tell (because she always can). She placed her hand between them, a silent invitation.

“Of course I am.” She met his eyes. “So are you, growing up with your parents. You don’t see it.”

“I know.” His hand covered hers. Her fingers were cold. “I’ll try to stay objective.”

“Thank you.”

They sat deep in thought for the rest of the ride, his fingers wound around her wrist, her pulse the only thing he registered besides the roaring of the engine.

“So, working theory.” They’d commandeered a conference room, their take-away lunch sitting half-eaten on the table and hung my printed-out documents on a wall, along with the photos. “Clarissa took her little brother without her parents knowing and ran.”

“With help from her father.” Peter pressed a sandwich in her hands. “Who’s just bought a house in Slough.”

“Which suggests pre-planning.”

“Also suggests they don’t plan on running for long.” She frowned, “A three-bedroom house. You don’t buy a three-bedroom house if you plan to move across the country months later.”

“But you don’t buy one when you’re a single guy, either.”

She took a bite, chewed as she thought. “What are they doing? We know where they’re going, eventually, they can’t hide.”

“Maybe they don’t want to.” He grabbed his soda, slurped out the last bit, smirking at her face as he did. (Loud sounds, she told me once. Eating sounds, disgusting. The sound of the last of a milkshake rattling through a thick straw, according to her, sounds exactly the same as someone trying to snort a Rice Crispy op their nose.)

“My theory still holds.” She nodded, “Maybe they just wanted to get him out of there, keep him safe and get the police involved at the same time.”

“Or maybe they’re just not that smart.” He shrugged. With a well-aimed throw, he tossed the cup in the garbage. “The girl’s, what, nineteen? Practically a kid. A teenager, famously unorganised.”

“I was organised.” she defended herself, “At that age, I was making a career for myself.”

“Yeah, well on your way to getting shot at.” He rolled his eyes, “Hate to break it to you, but you weren’t a normal teenager.”

“Neither is she, I don’t think.”

“Not if you’re right.” He bumped her shoulder with his, gentle. “Come on, let’s go through those contact details.”

There are certain aspects of her job that Shay detests with a burning passion, and the biggest one of that is paperwork. She can say it with such a scowl, as if she was a child talking about broccoli or Brussels sprouts. (Except, of course, she liked both of those things, and had apparently done since she was a little girl.) (I wish my little girl was like that.)

She hired me specifically to lessen the amount of paperwork she had to do, but sometimes, on some cases, there was no hiding from the gritty and boring.

They spent about twenty minutes constructing the perfect message, something short but not too concise that conveyed both you need to come home and we just want to help, both you’re not in any trouble and watch out, we’re the actual police. Then, they dropped it on any form of communication they could find, DM’ing it, emailing it, leaving voicemail messages reading it out. Then, all they could do was wait. Wait, and try again every thirty minutes on the dot. Peter almost felt sorry, mailbombing a child.

While they waited, they went over all the papers I’d gathered for them. Chase’s father didn’t have much of a record, but he had one citation a few years ago for public inebriation.

Still, something didn’t sit right with her.

“He doesn’t have to be an alcoholic.” Peter didn’t look up from his paper, but she knew he was paying attention. “He could just be an arse.”

“Or a normal person.” She glanced at him. “Remember, you’re impartial.”

“Yeah, he could just be a distressed father, refusing to help the one person capable and willing to find his son for free.” He looked at her properly, now. “I’m impartial, but not blind. Something’s going on.”

“There’s something in the bedside drawer we weren’t allowed to see.” She remembered, “You think they’re-?”

He hummed, “Shouldn’t it be a basement, then?”

“An ominous attic?” She put her pen down.

“Either way, you’d need more equipment for that, not just a bedside drawer.”

She froze, her brain skidding to a halt at his factual tone, at his usual open ease. “Have you-”

“No, but I’ve been on the internet.” His face was open, honest, reassuring, and about two seconds away from a fit of giggles. “I’ve seen the Fifty Shades trailers.”

“Just the trailers?” She looked at him, then apparently decided she didn’t want to go down that road while looking at the kidnapping of a child. “Never mind.”

He shuffled through the papers. “It’s been around eighteen hours.” He glanced at his watch. “We should probably call social services. Even if you’re wrong, his sister kidnapped him. They need counselling.”

“You do that.” She thumped her head on the table, groaning. “I wanna keep the lines open in case she calls.”

“Or her dad.” He flipped through some papers and dialled a number.

“I doubt it.” She lifted her head, just slightly. “We appealed to her. She’s vulnerable. He is…”

“A man?” He smirked at her.

“I didn’t say that.” She rolled her eyes. “But he does seem more stable than the nineteen-year-old who just stole her brother.”

“Fair.” He put her phone in speaker, the on-hold music filling the room. “They need to change this system. This sucks.”

“You need to get yourself a direct line to some counsellor.” She quirked a brow at the phone. “A counsellor would solve most of your problems, really.”

“Shut up.” He thumped his head on the table with a loud thud. “That’s against protocol.” He glared at her. “You fix it.”

She offered him one of those sugar-sweet fake smiles. “I’ll put it on the list.”

His sneering reply was cut off as her phone rang.