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TARR STEPS WAS BEAUTIFUL at any time of the year. Early on a May morning, it was magical. The wide stone slabs that crossed the river at this point looked as if they’d been placed there by storybook giants. Under a tunnel of trees, the sunlight dappling through the broad expanse of dark water made the pebbled riverbed glow like Tiffany glass.

The only sounds were the river and the songs of a thousand birds.

And the faint wailing of Mrs Knox up at the car park.

She’d been wailing when they’d arrived and was still wailing now, almost half an hour later. From his time with Homicide, Reynolds knew she might keep wailing for a good while yet. Quite possibly a lifetime, on and off.

Very annoying, when he was trying to think.

PC Colin Walters, the local officer who’d been first on the scene, stood silently beside him as if waiting for instructions, his already weathered complexion further lined with concern.

Reynolds sighed and turned away from the river, and they both trudged back up the hill to the car park where nine-year-old Pete Knox had vanished from the family car and been replaced – as if by some slick, sick magic – by a square yellow note on the steering wheel.

You don’t love him.

‘But we do. We do love him! What does it mean?’ sobbed Mrs Knox, whose husband was trying to wrap his arms around her – trying to smother her grief and his own – while she was floppy and frantic by turn. Suddenly she thrashed out of his arms and turned back on him with her teeth bared. ‘It’s your fault!’ she screamed, making him wince in shock. ‘Your fault! You sent him back to the car. How could you do that? He’s nine years old! He’s a baby! You stupid. Stupid. Bastard!’

She rushed her stricken husband and started flailing at him – beating him about the face and head, before Reynolds and Walters prised her away. She collapsed face-down beside the six-year-old Golf in which her family had driven from Swindon to spend a week communing with nature. Reynolds and Walters both looked instinctively to Elizabeth Rice for help, and she rolled her eyes, but crouched beside Mrs Knox. The woman had deflated like an old lilo on the dusty tarmac, weeping herself out for a little while. Rice patted her back three times before Mrs Knox stopped throwing her hand off, and then settled down to talking to her as if she were a hurt child – soft words of calm and hope that Reynolds couldn’t have managed if his life had depended on it, and which he was almost as surprised to hear coming from Rice.

At least it was quiet enough now to think.

‘She doesn’t mean it,’ he told Mr Knox. ‘She’s upset, that’s all. It’s understandable.’

Jeff Knox nodded dumbly, but looked unconvinced – as if his wife’s words would never leave him now, whether they found their son or not.

‘I did send him back to the car,’ he said miserably. ‘For a towel. He fell in the water. Just one foot up to his knee. Mucking about on the stepping stones, you know?’

Reynolds nodded and Mr Knox looked down at his slack wife again before going on – staring at the opposite side of the valley as if he might yet spot his son. As if there still might be a happy ending.

‘It’s only a couple of hundred yards and he’s a sensible boy. I thought he would be safe. There were other cars here. Other people. We were only five minutes behind him. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake!’

He halted angrily, and Reynolds knew that if God were here right now, Mr Knox would flail at him with the same hopeless, helpless terror as his wife had done.

‘I’ve got all the other car numbers, sir,’ said Walters. ‘A couple of them look to have been vandalized.’

Reynolds turned to him in interest.

‘Not much. Just a couple of windows broken.’

‘Anything taken?’

‘Not that I know of so far, but not everyone’s back at their cars, so we’ll find out then.’

‘Maybe he was disturbed.’

Walters led him over to a Toyota RAV4 with a hole the size of a tennis ball punched in the back window. Reynolds stooped and cupped his hands so that he could peer into the dark interior. He jerked backwards as a flurry of fur, teeth and saliva slammed against the glass an inch from his face.

‘Shit!’

His heart racing, Reynolds banged the glass in retaliation at the German Shepherd that took up most of the rear of the car.

He glanced at Walters to see if he was laughing, but the PC looked concerned, if anything. Thank God.

Reynolds scanned the car park. Unlike the scene at Dunkery Beacon, this was a proper car park – maybe thirty bays, and a new toilet block made carefully rustic. The day was young. There were perhaps a dozen cars. A few of them had bored-looking owners standing or sitting close by. People in hiking gear, children in shorts, dogs on leads, bikes and backpacks.

‘OK, Walters. Don’t let anyone come in or leave.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the note on the steering wheel. We’re keeping that back.’

‘Yes, sir.’