Yet, when she talks to a student that lives in one of the houses, he claims that he just knows Harper by sight, but when Erica goes, he starts cursing and sends a text to his friends, asking them if they should talk, but he is told to keep quiet. Another officer, PC Erica Somer, is questioning the neighbours, and nobody seems to know anything. So far they don’t have an identity, and there is nothing in the missing persons records. Everybody assumes that the boy is hers, and she and the child were kept captive in that cellar by Harper. And when the interview finishes, he even attacks a police constable because she gave him a cup of steaming tea which scalded his mouth.ĭC Verity Everett is in the hospital, but the girl has been sedated because she got hysterical when the boy was taken to her.

When Harper is being interviewed, he is rude and scornful of everybody: his neighbours, his two late wives. The man has Alzheimer’s, and he was only visited by his social worker, Derek Ross, once a week. The girl and the boy are taken to hospital, and Quinn and Gislingham interview the man, William Harper, a former professor at Birmingham University. Then in the cellar they find a young girl, dirty and lying on a bare mattress, and next to her there is a two-year-old boy. When they break into the next-door house, they find an old man in the toilet, and he clearly has dementia. The police are called, and DS Gareth Quinn and DC Chris Gislingham get there.

There is a crack that opens up in the next-door house, and when Mark Sexton, the owner, touches the wall, it gives way and a hole appears, and then he sees a face. The architect tells him that there is a problem in the cellar. This time the book starts with a rich man who has bought a big Victorian house in North Oxford and has workers on the property.

This is the second book in the series featuring DI Fawley and his unit.

In the dark cara hunter