Hold My Hand: The addictive new crime thriller that you won’t be able to put down in 2018

It was almost eleven. She’d blocked out three hours for the meeting, saying she was taking her mother to the doctor’s in Oxford, so she still had forty-five minutes before she was due back at the station for the weekend briefing. It was Paul’s birthday party that night and she still hadn’t got him a present, though she knew exactly the thing. Her brother, like their dad before him, had started balding in his early thirties, and Bath was the sort of city that still had gentlemen’s outfitters. A quick Google had given her a promising place off Wallford Street. She walked across the cobbles, then stepped out into the throng.

Bath was never quiet, of course, but Friday lunchtime in the summer holidays was pretty close to Jo’s idea of hell. An engine of commerce. Tourists jostling with street performers, gaggles of teenagers up to nothing. Workers – mostly Europeans and South Americans – on breaks from jobs at hotels. People spilling out of cafes, bars and shops. And here and there, the city’s true denizens – Jo’s bread and butter. The drug addicts, leaning towards their next fix. The pickpockets, swimming with the tides. The petty criminals who existed in every city; the grit in the machine.

Jo fought through the pedestrians outside the Assembly Rooms before slipping off into a narrower alley, a row of bikes chained up against a set of railings. She found the hat place, and though at first she thought it must be closed, when she pushed the door, it opened, a bell above her clanking. A small, very elderly man with luxuriant white hair and a stoop looked up from behind a counter.

‘Good day to you,’ he said.

Jo smiled at the unexpected chivalry, but just as she was about to speak, her phone rang again. This time the vibration was different.

‘Excuse me!’ she said, and she backed out of the shop to take the call.

‘Why aren’t you answering?’ said Rob Bridges, her DCI back at the station. ‘Ben’s been trying for the last hour.’

It took Jo a moment to gain her composure. ‘With my mum,’ she said. ‘It’s in the diary.’

Bridges breathed a sigh. ‘Fine, can you talk?’

‘What’s up?’

‘We’ve got a body. Bradford-on-Avon. A kid.’

Jo looked at her reflection in the window of the shop, swallowed. ‘Go on.’

‘Thames Valley have already sent someone, but I want you there.’

‘Why Thames Valley?’

‘Something to do with identifying features. They think it’s one of their mispers.’

‘Text me the address,’ said Jo. ‘I’ll call when I’m on my way.’

She hung up. Paul’s present could wait.

* * *

It took Jo three minutes to get back to her car, another seven to get out of the car park. She plugged in the address as she did so, but it looked like it was the middle of a random field. Bradford-on-Avon was a well-to-do market town about five miles out from Bath – all Cotswold stone and shops she could never afford. The sort of place her mum would’ve liked to spend an afternoon, before her world shrank to the four walls of a room in a residential care home. As soon as she was out of traffic, her phone rang again. Ben. This time she answered on the hands-free.

‘I’m on my way,’ she said.

‘So what’s wrong with your mum?’ No pleasantries.

‘Y’know,’ Jo replied airily. ‘What’s right with her? She’s old. I took her to the doctor’s.’

‘Really? When you didn’t answer, I rang the home looking for you. She’s there. You’re not. They couldn’t remember the last time you’d visited.’

Dammit.

‘You should have called me on the station line.’

He didn’t answer for a few seconds, then said, more softly, ‘Can we talk later?’

Jo’s hands tightened on the wheel. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

‘It’s been months, Jo. We can’t just avoid the subject forever.’

‘There is no subject,’ she said. ‘That’s how breaking up works. Put Rob on.’

‘He’s already on his way as well.’

‘Well, you fill me in then.’

Ben gathered himself and gave her the details. A skeleton had been unearthed in the grounds of a derelict house off the Frome Road. They’d found a body by the pumping house of the drained pool. From the size, it could only be a child.

‘Any idea when the pool was put in?’ asked Jo. The satnav said she’d be there in twenty-one minutes.

‘We’re looking into it – still trying to track the owners of the house. It’s been a wreck for eighteen months. Electrical fault caused a fire, apparently.’

‘So what makes them think it’s an Oxford misper?’

‘There’s clothing that matches an old file,’ said Ben. ‘A Liverpool football club shirt.’

Jo’s foot touched the brake involuntarily, and the BMW behind beeped as it drove up into her rear-view mirror.

‘You okay?’ asked Ben.

‘I’ll be there in fifteen,’ said Jo. She stepped on the accelerator, feeling the engine surge along with her racing heart.

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