Their interview with Sapphira Callaghan had not simply given them a new avenue to explore but a whole new side to their investigation. What had originally been a double murder had quickly careened into a sordid story of abuse, professional incompetence, and if Amanda Callaghan had somehow escaped the fire, she needed to be held accountable for the death of her eight-year-old daughter and a neighbor she'd slandered.

Stella's hard work had quickly uncovered that, while Amanda's bank accounts hadn't been touched after the fire, her husband's life insurance money had been totally cleaned out. If that damn fire chief had just looked a little more closely into the fire, police would have done a proper investigation and seen it a decade ago. If there was one thing Boyd couldn't tolerate, it was sloppy policing. Sure, many would call him a bully or ruthless, and he was both those things, but he'd have much preferred high-flyer or maverick. His intense passion for the pursuit of justice had him bending or full-on breaking rules, but, in Boyd's eyes, it was all worth it. Having to put a case back on a shelf was always the most painful thing for him – to know he'd failed to find someone's murderer and force them to answer for their crimes. Not this time. Maybe the Callaghans had died in the fire; if they had, he'd just find another avenue to explore.

Neither Boyd nor Grace had felt Sapphira had lied in her interview; she'd seemed very genuine and truly guilty for leaving her sisters behind. She'd told them that her caseworkers hadn't been all that interested in the abuse going on even after the fire, and Boyd wanted to know exactly why her pleas for help had been shoved aside and why children had been refused safety.

With just a little digging, they'd managed to track down Diana Bridgeman; she'd retired a couple of years back, but that hadn't stopped Boyd sending Spence to drag her in by the collar for an interview. He stood there staring at her through the two-way glass with his arms folded across his chest as Grace did some last-minute reading on her. Totally out of place, that was the first thought that had come to mind when he'd seen her. A woman in her early seventies with a hairstyle that screamed temperamental, deep wrinkles in her forehead and around her mouth. There wasn't anything outwardly alarming or worrisome about Mrs. Bridgeman – just an old woman like any other. Looks could be deceiving though; everyone on the Cold Case Unit knew that all too well.

"Hurry the hell up." He suddenly barked shattering the calm silence. "I want to get this over with."

With that, he marched into the depressing interrogation room with Grace only a few steps behind him and dropped into a chair as he had so many times before.

"I hope this won't take too long, Detective; it's just that my husband is very ill." Mrs. Bridgeman told them with a small smile as though nothing in the world could be wrong. Boyd flicked a file open and took his glasses from his pocket. "That other officer of yours said something about a case I'd worked on. I'm afraid I worked so many cases in my career."

"How about I jog your memory then, hmm?" He huffed without even bothering to introduce himself or Grace. "Between 1983 and 1999, you were solely responsible for the five daughters adopted by John and Amanda Callaghan, who lived at 13 Sleighberry Street. Elizabeth, Sapphira, Rachel, Abigail, and Mary. Five girls taken from terrible environments and placed somewhere they were meant to be loved and protected. Instead, after John's death, the girls were subjected to a litany of abuse which steadily grew worse. Now, as the one meant to keep an eye on them – I mean, you were in and out of their lives for over a decade because of the constant adoptions – you should have picked up on the abuse going on." He pulled his glasses off as he breathed out a laugh. "So, I guess what I want to know is: were you going out of your way to ignore the girls asking for help, or were you just terrible at your job?"

Mrs. Bridgeman's mouth fluttered a moment as blue eyes glanced to Grace, possibly in search of help; then that prim and proper demeanor descended again and she sat a little straighter.

"How dare you?" A single finger slammed down on the interview desk. "I worked for Social Services for thirty-nine selfless years, and I made sure all of those children were safe." Boyd cared little for her outrage. "I remember those girls. Their father's death damaged them. The older ones started stealing from their mother's purse and bullying the younger ones. Rachel would shove Mary out of the way for no reason; I saw it. Then came the lying, the constant lies, and normally from Sapphira. That girl was spiteful. It started with things like her mother depriving them of food when really she'd been sent to bed without dinner because she'd stolen wine from the liquor cabinet."

Grace seemed confused. "How did you investigate Sapphira's and her sister's claims? Surely you did more than just casually asking Amanda about it?"

A pause lingered then and that pause said far more to Boyd than Mrs. Bridgeman ever could.

"Amanda could be strict, but those girls needed strict," insisted the old woman dressed pale yellow. "Elizabeth kept stealing and Sapphira was going off the rails. She'd started getting herself involved with the wrong crowd."

"Wrong crowd?" Boyd grumbled. "They were all homeschooled; the only crowd they had was each other, their mother and brother."

Mrs. Bridgeman scowled. "I mean that neighbor, shifty man that he was. Slept all day and went out in search of drugs at night. Sapphira would sneak out to go meet him until Amanda caught on and stopped it. After that, she started doing all sorts to make her mother look bad. She came to me one day when I'd been to check on Mary, covered in bruises on her back. She'd actually started hurting herself."

"I'm sorry," his glasses were snatched off again. "Are you actually trying to tell me that a sixteen-year-old girl was beating herself with a belt to make a more impressive sob story? Are you fucking delusional? So, what? Did you even look into that or just keep ticking the a-okay box on your reports? What the hell did you want the girls to do – bring you video footage and a signed confession from Amanda?!"

"You can't speak to me like that."

"I'll speak to you however the hell I want right now. You repeatedly ignored five little girls begging you for help. Donovan Padmore might have slept all day, but that was because he worked nights, not because he was dealing drugs and a borderline pimp! Did you even think for a single second something serious might be going on? No, I bet you just saw a so-called good Christian woman accusing a black guy and thought there couldn't possibly be anything dodgy happening."

"Boyd," said Grace in a calming tone. She understood his anger, but it wouldn't do them any good there and then. Fortunately, because he trusted Grace implicitly, Boyd took a breath to calm down rather than ploughing forward like a runaway train. "You must have had so many case files to juggle, Mrs. Bridgeman; I've been in a similar situation – I'm a psychologist, you see. It's hard to devote the time we'd like to when we're so overwhelmed. Mary's adoption hadn't been finalized, you still had a lot of paperwork to deal with. The other girls probably looked like they wanted attention. However, looking back on it now, things might seem different." Grace's voice might have remained level and gentle, but Boyd hardly held back his rage; his eye twitched intermittently, a vein at his temple pulsated, and the look on his face could surely have hardened criminals curl into a ball. "I'd like you to do something for me, Mrs. Bridgeman. Close your eyes and forget about everything Amanda ever said to you. Forget about how heavy your caseloads were and just think about the girls. Think about them right from the day Elizabeth was placed with the Callaghans to the day Sapphira was picked up by police and told you about what was going on at home. Think about the tones they used, the looks in their eyes, their body language when their brother and mother were in the room." After a moment the older woman reluctantly closed her eyes, part of her had looked ready to argue, but fortunately that bit hadn't won out. "Take your time, make sure you see it all clearly. Now, when you look back on it, do you think those girls were telling the truth?"

Silence consumed the room; a heavy blanket engulfed them all in a noiseless void. Silence, a strange thing was silence, almost a paradox. That a total absence of sound could be so deafeningly loud shouldn't have been possible, yet there silence went screaming at them. Mrs. Bridgeman sat amongst it a moment as it surrounded her, a tragic accompaniment to her memories. Boyd almost broke it but didn't give in to his urge to yell. Instead, he waited while Grace played her mind games – not that she'd appreciate him calling her work mind games. Then, after more minutes than expected, a single tear escaped Mrs. Bridgeman.

"… yes," she whispered before her eyes shot open and a hand flew up to cover her mouth.

"Yes?!" Boyd laughed incredulously. "You ignored years of them begging you for help, told Sapphira she should have been grateful to have a mother like Amanda Callaghan after the fire, and treated them like they deserved it, and now all you have to say is yes? You should be fucking ashamed of yourself! You perpetuated years of abuse and Mary is dead because you couldn't be bothered to do your own fucking job!"

Boyd shot to his feet almost knocking the chair over with the force and stormed out. He'd not been able to look at that woman a moment longer. Outside in the observation area, Stella spun around in her seat where she'd been monitoring the whole thing; she worried her lip a bit.

"Are you okay?"

Boyd sighed. "Fine, Stella. Just – I'll be in my office."

No wonder Sapphira had just walked out at eighteen and never returned if that was the calibre of people she'd been dealing with.

~X~

Several days crawled by with next to no new information indicating the Callaghans had escaped the fire other than the cleared-out insurance money. If they were still alive, they'd successfully changed their names and moved to a new area in obscurity. Spence saw the case as a series of closing doors, and Boyd hated that he'd started to agree. For all they knew, Sapphira had been wrong and the Callaghans had died in an accidental fire. Maybe Amanda had killed Donovan and Mary for some reason, then the electrics had shorted to start the inferno; as good a theory as any. Perhaps there wasn't anybody to arrest in this case. That said, the total lack of bodies was extremely suspicious when one considered that Donovan's and Mary's bodies in the chimney had remained intact.

Meanwhile, in another part of misty London, a blonde woman in her mid-fifties stood in her hall with a phone pressed firmly to her ear and a deep scowl on her face; if that scowl was due to the situation or something which had been permanently ingrained over the years wasn't entirely clear.

"Stop panicking, Adam." She hissed, which had the two young women in the living room flinch. "This is the Devil's doing. He wants revenge but he won't get it. God won't let us suffer because we've done his work. That sinful little man deserved everything he got and Sapphira had already turned Mary into a whore. Just stay calm."

She slammed the phone down, then turned to her youngest surviving daughters. Neither uttered a word; they'd long learnt it wouldn't end well for them. Nobody had mentioned Mary in years and, had it not been for Elizabeth, they'd have never known she'd died. Their mother had only ever said she was gone. As for their big sister, hearing her real name had actually shocked them for a moment because their mother and brother had insisted referred to her as 'whore' or 'slut' in passing. They'd been eleven and eight the last time they'd seen Sapphira, and, while Rachel had come to hate her, Abigail still remembered the day she'd run away and how desperately Elizabeth had urged her to. None of it had made sense in an eight-year-old girl's mind, but as a girl of seventeen, she couldn't bring herself to blame Sapphira for running; had Adam not grabbed her, she would have done the same.

"Naomi, go finish your chores." Her mother ordered.

"Yes, Mother."

Seeing her chance for escape, Abigail hurried out to begin mopping the kitchen floor. Naomi, her mother had been calling her that since they'd abruptly left the old house. Stealing their names had just been another thing Abigail hadn't understood, another way to hurt them. Abigail and Rachel or Naomi and Ruth, who did their mother want them to be? Who would their mother allow them to be? Elizabeth was upstairs – Elizabeth was always upstairs these days – Mary and Sapphira were gone while Rachel despised everyone and everything. Sometimes Abigail didn't even see the point any longer.

~X~

Boyd's stomach had pulled him out of the office that Thursday since coffee wasn't an actual food group and a sorry-looking sandwich wasn't going to cut it. So, with hardly a word to Spence, who'd had a stack of files almost as tall as his arm was long, Boyd had slipped out to his vehicle and made for the little Italian place he liked. Rain had dominated the London landscape for almost a solid week, so Boyd was pleased to again see blue sky as he drove with the radio playing quietly in the background. Lunch would be a good break from work, from the dark crime scene photographs and almost unending cross-referencing.

As he came to a stop at the lights, brown eyes flashed to the people moving around him – just regular people going about their daily lives without a care in the world. There had been a time when he'd wanted to be one of them, but he'd never been very good at anything save for policing – and there were even those who'd insist he was too volatile for that.

Suddenly a minor altercation caught his eye. A man of approximately thirty had shoved a younger woman away from him when she'd handed a toy duck back to – what Boyd assumed – was the man's son. Although the thing which had held his attention was that he knew the backpack with distinctive zigzag pattern and therefore the girl wearing it. Sapphira hadn't argued, just carried on walking with nobody caring for a second why she looked cold and tired. Lights changed, a car behind him honked, and, before he'd known it, Boyd had turned left instead of carrying on so he could pull up alongside Sapphira and roll down his window.

"Hi, Sapphira."

The smile she flashed him brightened her vibrant green eyes and his day along with them. Beautiful, she was just beautiful.

"Hello, Mister Boyd – or is it Detective Superintendent Boyd?"

He smirked. "Boyd is fine."

"You found who killed my sister and friend yet?"

"Not yet," he confessed. "Would be easier if we could get in touch with you. I've got a couple more questions, actually."

Sapphira paused a moment, then leaned on the door of his car. To be perfectly honest, any onlookers would surely be suspicious why an older guy was talking to a much younger, clearly homeless girl through a car window.

"There's a shelter over on Grady Street. I sleep there sometimes; you can leave a message for me there if you need me."

The gray-haired man sighed; he'd combed that shelter over a dozen times looking for Luke, and, frankly, he'd have rather forgotten it existed entirely. Still, Sapphira needed to sleep somewhere, and it was certainly safer than a random bench.

"I'll remember that." Hungry, she was clearly hungry and he'd been on his way to lunch anyway, so his next question shouldn't have been a surprise. "Hey, there's this Italian place I'm fond of. I was going to grab lunch; care to join me?"

"You realize that sounded like a pick-up line, right?" She teased sweetly. "I don't want to be a bother though."

In his harrowing search for Luke, Boyd had reached the conclusion that street kids developed one of three personalities simply out of necessity: the profiteer who took any opportunity that came their way to get food, shelter, and money even if that meant stealing it from other homeless kids. The violent ones who generated a bubble of fear around them as a protective shield, which often ended up backfiring on them in one way or another; as a policeman, Boyd was all too familiar with that type. Lastly, were the invisible ones, the ones who went out of their way to avoid being even a slight inconvenience for regular people as though they carried some kind of plague. They didn't beg or steal if they could help it, just focused on staying alive as quietly as possible because they thought they were the problem. One sentence from Sapphira had caused Boyd to classify her as the latter. and it made him grind his teeth together. Everyone who'd been supposed to protect her hadn't; that wasn't her fault.

"Sapphira, I doubt you could ever be a bother to anyone." He nodded to the passenger seat beside him. "Come on, get in. We'll have lunch and I can ask you some more questions."

An internal debate went on behind polished emeralds for a few seconds while people continued to wander passed them on the busy street. Again, part of Boyd's mind spared a thought to how it must have looked from the outside, as though he were just some shameless dirty old man and Sapphira a cheap prostitute. It didn't matter; they knew the truth.

Finally, the twenty-five-year-old nodded and hurried around the hood to clamber in beside him. She squeezed her backpack between her feet in the footwell, then buckled herself in as Boyd took off toward the restaurant again. Brown eyes spied her every now and again out the corner of his eye as she practically hid inside her long raven hair. Everything Sapphira held dear in the world had been crammed into that bag, and wasn't that a depressing realization? It was all wrong! She shouldn't have looked like that. Sapphira should have been smiling and happy; she should have been chatting with friends and sleeping in a bed of her own every night, not doing her best not to exist. Weakness for a pretty face, Grace had always known it and the rest of the team hadn't taken long to pick up on it either, but Boyd knew this woman wasn't out to manipulate him; she just wanted to know the truth. Boyd cared; that gave him zero advantage, but he cared.

When they arrived, Sapphira had been pleased to find the place rather quiet meaning only waiting staff took any real notice of her. She'd been even happier when they'd been seated at a small table toward the back of the building. Boyd had put his glasses on to read the menu, which had made her smile a little because the way he peeked over them at her was utterly adorable.

"You can have anything you want, okay? So don't just choose the soup because it's cheap."

Hadn't taken him more than two seconds to clock that she'd read the prices instead of the meals themselves. Part of the gray-haired man chastised himself for almost treating her like a child, but direct was his habitual state and unlikely to change at that stage of his life; his personality-changing days had left him when his dark hair had. Fortunately it had worked because she'd soon ordered the seafood risotto, which, when he paused to think about it, had been a very wise choice. Not only would it be filling, but probably one of the more nutritional things on the menu thanks to protein-rich monkfish, not to mention mussels and clams providing more vitamin C and omega-3 than she'd likely had in years.

"So," he began as his glasses were returned to their usual top pocket of his black suit. "When you were in my office we went over a lot, but – well, I realized I still didn't know much about you and your sisters. Would you tell me?"

Sapphira nodded. "For a while it was just me, Elle, and Adam. Things were actually kind of good back then but I don't remember much since I was four-ish. My dad always called me and Elle twins even though our birthdays are a month apart. I was closest to her. Only special people could ever call her Elle; that was just me and Dad."

A slight smile settled on her face which pleased him. "And what did they call you? Saph?"

"Most people call me Saph, especially at the shelter; it's easier. Sapphie was their name for me; Donovan used it as well."

"Sapphie suits you." A waiter dropped off their drinks then, cola for her and white wine for him; Boyd didn't really care he was on duty. "Sounds like the two of you were pretty inseparable."

A large sip of her sugary drink was had before a response came. "We were. Elle was always drawing, that was her thing. She was good at it too. Sometimes she'd do these drawings of angels for Mother, kind of like a peace offering. Mary tried drawing, but she couldn't get passed stick figures."

"I know how she felt." Boyd breathed out a laugh. "Not sure my childhood art was even worthy of being put on the fridge. What em – what about Abigail and Rachel? What were they like?"

Memories descended over Sapphira again, some of happier times while others were pain incarnate. Asking wasn't just to fill a conversation, Boyd hoped understanding the girls' personalities a little better would give him new possibilities for finding them – if they were even alive. Elizabeth liking art didn't sound all that helpful, but every little helped.

"I guess you'd have called Abigail rambunctious. Never ran out of energy. She liked to run around and climb trees." Sapphira sighed deeply as she helped herself to another sip of her drink. "Or at least she did until Adam started beating her with sticks he found in the yard. Mother always called Abigail shifty, like she was doing something wrong by just being herself." The more he heard about this woman, the more he wanted to throttle the life out of her. "Rachel, though, something had always been off about Rachel. We didn't get along with her that much. I mean, we loved her, but she didn't seem to like any of us. She became like Adam's little lackey the older we got. He hurt her as much if not more than the rest of us, but she'd always trail after him."

Their meals arrived after that and seeing Sapphira genuinely enjoy her food warmed Boyd's heart. She should have been like that all the time. Steam rose up from his own bowl of pasta, it tasted wonderfully of sage and pancetta, but couldn't quite bring the same joy that watching her eat did. Each mouthful was savored instead of shovelled down to fill an empty belly and, with each bite, Sapphira began to remember she was actually human. He kept her talking, wanted lunch to last as long as possible just so he could carry on gazing at that beautiful smile. Soon, between morsels, he'd discovered the real reason she'd managed to survive on the streets so long. When she'd first left care Sapphira had managed to find a proper job at a café for a couple of years until she'd been fired for punching the owner's son. Truthfully, if a man didn't understand that no meant no, Boyd was all for a woman smacking it into him. Since then she'd done odd jobs here and there, basically anything that paid some cash, and probably some less than legal stuff she'd have rather kept to herself.

"What about Donovan? How did you get on with him? He was a lot older than you, so I doubt you had much in common."

"Actually," started Sapphira as she set her cutlery down and reached for the last of her drink. "We were really good friends. Didn't treat me like I was just some kid." A smile pulled itself across her face then. "I remember sometimes we'd sneak down to the park when he got home from work and nobody would be around. We'd eat junk food and he'd tell me what the stars were called. That was what he'd wanted to do, astrology."

"So he was scientifically minded, was he?"

Sapphira nodded. "I suppose. Look, I know it's weird for a guy in his forties to be friends with a fifteen-year-old girl, but Donovan didn't really have any friends and most people he talked to about jazz and constellations just looked at him like he was a weirdo. We were both lonely, so we just ended up being lonely together."

"No, I get that." The chair squeaked as Boyd leaned back in it and a waiter cleared their plates. "I didn't think he tried to hurt you or anything like that. Did – did you know he'd been accused of stealing at work?"

"No, but I'm not surprised. I bet it was his boss, right? Not sure what was going on there, but he really didn't like Donovan for some reason. Those two were always butting heads. Whatever he got accused of taking, he didn't. Donovan wasn't like that. He was the sort who gave rather than took." She flashed him a smile. "Can I ask you questions, or is this the part of the film where the handsome cop interrogates the girl unwaveringly?"

That had him chuckle a moment. "Don't know about handsome."

"Come on, you're cute and you know it."

Well, he'd certainly never thought himself ugly, but cute wasn't a word people often associated with Boyd.

"This where I learn you've got a secret crush on me and spend the rest of the film facing off against your other love interest?" He teased back which earned him another of her dazzling smiles and a laugh.

"Something tells me you can take him."

He'd not even known how badly he'd needed that – to just joke and quip with somebody without having to worry about work. 'Clara Gold' said his mind suddenly, so suddenly that it took a second for the rest of him to catch up and, once it had, his grin floundered a little.

"This happened once before, you know. Well, not exactly; the girl was younger than you – eighteen."

Sapphira leaned forward on her elbows, clearly eager to hear his not-so-sordid tale. "Oh yeah? What happened then?"

"Well," he bantered. "I kissed her in front of her parents and she hated me after that."

"So she wasn't ready to tell her parents she'd found a new daddy, huh?"

Now that got a real laugh out of him, something genuine from deep down which bordered on cathartic. Boyd could yell, flirt, and intimidate at will, but an actual straightforward conversation had always been something he'd struggled with and probably part of the reason he shouted so frequently.

"Nah, I think it was more to do with the fact I only did it to provoke her father, and I'd just told her that he'd killed her sister because he wanted to have sex with her and she'd said no."

Sapphira paused a moment and Boyd could have kicked himself, but instead of shying away from him, Sapphira carried on talking.

"Yeah, that would have done it. I don't think you're going to tell me my dad killed my sister though, and I think something much darker happened to my sister."

Boyd couldn't have agreed more. "I think so too."

The whole dynamic of their conversation changed then, gone was the jovial lilt and in its place settled memories both would have rather forgotten entirely. The bill got paid and Sapphira pulled on her backpack again as they both totally ignored the fact she'd never actually asked any of the questions she'd wanted to. Boyd had handed her his card then offered to find her a place to stay much as Grace had during their first meeting, but she'd kindly turned him down again insisting she didn't want to be a bother.

"Thank you for lunch, Boyd, it was delicious."

Sapphira rose up onto her tiptoes with one hand atop his forearm so petal-like lips could press a delicate kiss to his cheek. Then she was gone, returned to the relentless London streets though this time with a warm meal in her. Luke had run from him so many times while Sapphira had simply walked, but both had left Boyd feeling as though he'd never catch up.