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By Root 391 0

appeals were made, newspapers ran daily updates – genuinely keen to help, perhaps, but profiting nonetheless from the increased sales that their lurid headlines engendered. The children’s faces appearing in those papers were poster models of innocence. Samuel’s hair was every bit as curly as Alice’s but his was jet black and his eyes were the warm brown of rich caramel, and the hearts of the entire nation went out to the parents. Almost the entire nation. Many dark-hearted people looked at the pictures of those children with feelings very far removed from pity or compassion. Men and women both. Society waking up to the chilling knowledge that one in every four of those sexual predators was a woman. And one forty-seven-year-old man in particular collected the pictures as they appeared in the papers. He would cut and paste them into a scrapbook with hands sculpted by the harsh weather and salt air into cruel things. His eyes would glitter as he pressed the cuttings hard into the pages of the book, his hands stroking the children’s faces as he smoothed them flat, fixing them. They glittered with a green cast, like an old bottle, like the ocean.

A month passed and still there was no sign of the abducted children, no witnesses came forward. No contact or ransom demand was made. Although it was clear from the outset this was no abduction for financial gain. It was as if the boy and girl had simply vanished off the face of the Earth in a moment, in a heartbeat. Only of course it hadn’t been a heartbeat and every waking minute since they’d disappeared represented an eternity of suffering for the boy’s mother Laura Ramirez. Nightly she would seek peace in her dreams but found heartbreaking tragedy instead. She would see her son walking into her room, climbing into bed with her, snuggling up to keep warm and she would smooth his hair, realising it had all just been a nightmare. And then she would wake up and the horror of it all would hit her again, turning her stomach muscles liquid, her mind reeling so that she gagged and dry-retched, her body shuddering with the inconsolable pain of it. Ghost-walking through the days, her nerves shredded, she would look at every boy out on the streets and for a desperate moment she would dare to hope. And at home she would sit and look at the front door as though mesmerised, and at every knock she’d say a prayer and close her eyes before she opened it. The hope ate away at her like cancer.

As for Alice’s mother, to the outside observer the loss of her child had seemingly little impact on her behaviour. She had been an alcoholic drug abuser before Alice had gone missing and the sad tragedy of her daughter’s disappearance had no seemingly redemptive effect on her. She sucked up the pity she was offered like she sucked up cheap wine, until she was tired of having to put on a brave face, and the charity of strangers that had at first fuelled her alcoholic emotional anaesthesia dwindled to frosty stares and muttered comments whenever her back was turned, comments loud enough for her to hear, whispered fingers of blame poking right at her. What kind of an addict falls unconscious and allows her angel of a nine-year-old daughter to roam the streets alone like that … Finally she had had enough. She changed her name and moved so that she could put it all behind her and forget she had ever lived in Carlton Row.

But human conscience is an organic and mutable thing. Wired differently in the individual mind so that two people could be almost from different species.

Two years after the summer evening in mid-August when Samuel Ramirez and Ellie Peters had disappeared into the ether, Laura Ramirez killed herself by stepping front of a high-speed train at a level crossing. Her existence wiped out in a thunderous moment.

Three weeks after that Peter Garnier was arrested.

It happened like this.

*

On a late Sunday afternoon Garnier had approached a small eight-year-old boy – who was seemingly on his own – in some wooded parkland bordering the Ruislip Lido. It was common land, like the Mad Bess Woods a mile