‘Oh, bugger it,’ he swore as the realisation hit him. Lucy Chandler’s mother had assumed the girl was with her friend Samantha Jago, to whom they had now spoken and Jack had suddenly remembered that Rose knew Samantha’s mother, Joyce Jago. Joyce was one of her pupils and Rose had mentioned her name several times as being one of the few with natural talent. And if Rose knows Joyce Jago there’s nothing to stop her finding out the rest. Please, please let her stay out of it, he prayed.They had a list of sex offenders but the profile didn’t fit any of them. ‘Lucy Chandler was in the pub with her boyfriend and they had a row,’ Jack informed his team. ‘She walked off and left him intending to make her way to the bus-stop on the main road, which explains her whereabouts at the time. Our problem is that she won’t give us the boyfriend’s name.’ There was a possibility that he was the rapist and she was protecting him, because it was her mother who had called the police, or there might be another reason.
