Blood Atonement by Dan Waddell

girl,’ she added, and went back inside.
    They stepped into the pouring rain and headed for Foster’s car. Once inside he could tell she was still seething.
    ‘What
    do you think now? Black sheep or scumbag?’
    Foster said with a smile.
    ‘What a wanker. I don’t know how some women do it,’
    she said, echoing Foster’s thoughts.
    ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.
    ‘Too many similarities. The mother dying on the same day as the daughter going missing. The fact it was her fourteenth birthday … It could still be coincidence, I suppose. And there’s nothing else to link them, other than circumstance and a DNA sample that could be shared with another half a million people. Do you think our charming Mart had anything to do with it?’
    ‘Who knows,’ Foster said. ‘We’ll come back to him, though.’ He started the engine. ‘Let’s poke around a bit more and see what comes up.’ He put the car in gear and slowly pulled away. ‘But first we need to find sweet little Gary’
     
    Horton and Sarah Rowley appeared to have been erased from the pages of history. At times when Nigel had lost the trail on other cases, he found sleeping on it helped; when he woke up, an idea of how to break the impasse was often there, fully formed. But that morning he remained stymied.
    He was unsure what to do with his day. A heap of casework was piling up, but it palled against the prospect of helping Foster and Heather. Then there was the matter of his nascent television career. Since his humiliation in Kensal Green cemetery earlier that week he had heard nothing. He could only think that the programme-makers had seen his screen test and, after they’d finished laughing, started tracking down a presenter with a modicum of aptitude. He should be pleased - after all, he rarely watched television himself, being more of a radio man. Yet part of him was thrilled at the prospect of appearing on television and where it may lead. He imagined himself being recognized in the street. Worse, he imagined himself enjoying being recognized in the street. He, Nigel Barnes, a man who struggled to get recognized in his own sitting room. He fired up his computer and checked his e-mails.
    Nothing from the producer.
    He went to the kitchen, still in his striped dressing gown and pyjamas. A low pale early winter sun glancing through the window made him squint. He ate toast most mornings and saw no reason to change his routine. He carved the last slices from the brittle, stale sourdough loaf, made a mental note to get to the delicatessen to purchase another, and placed them in his eccentric old toaster. He flicked the kettle on and gazed out of the window, wondering when the house opposite, wreathed in scaffolding, would ever be finished. It had to be a year now and he was bored by the sound of poorly attached tarpaulin flapping in the autumn wind. What were they doing … ?
    His thoughts were interrupted by the scent of burning.
    When he turned, he could see his toaster billowing plumes of black smoke, forcing him to lunge over and manually evict the contents. Being averse to any form of waste, he grabbed a knife and flipped open his bin, attempting to render the pieces edible by scraping off the bits that were burned beyond repair. It soon became clear they were beyond saving. Nigel cursed to himself. Must get a new toaster, he thought. Or get the grill in the oven fixed so he could make proper toast. Of course Agas made the best toast, but they were hardly compatible with cramped London kitchens. Whatever, there was no point spending his hard-earned cash on freshly baked bread while his toaster was so temperamental. The two blackened shards in his hand could have been two stale pieces of sliced white. Only the gourmet equivalent of a DNA test could have revealed their true identity. He laughed to himself. Then stopped.
    Now there was an idea.
     
    Ethnoancestry was based in Ealing, in a nondescript redbrick hutch down an anonymous side