The Dead Tracks

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    We met in a restaurant on the Thames called Boneacres. They were sitting in a booth at the back. Rain was running down the windows and both of them were staring out at a queue of people waiting in line for the Eye. The woman looked up first. Caroline Carver. She'd been crying. The whites of her eyes were stained red, and some of her makeup had run. She was slim and well dressed, in her mid forties, but didn't wear it well: there were lines in her face — thick and dark like oil paint - that looked as if they'd been carved with a scalpel, and though she smiled as I approached, it wasn't warm. She'd been past warm. Most of the parents I dealt with were like that. The longer their kids were missing, the colder their lives became.

    She slid out from the booth and we both shook hands, then she made way for her husband. James Carver. He was huge; a bear of a man. He didn't get up, just reached across the table and swallowed my hand in his. I knew a little about them already, mostly from Caroline's initial phone call a couple of days before. She'd told me they lived in an old church — converted into a four-bedroom home — from which he ran his building firm, a business he'd built up over fifteen years. Judging by the property's two-million-pound price tag, the name brands they were sporting and some of his celebrity clients, it was keeping them pretty comfortable.

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