Inspector Francis Sadler

Detective Constable Connie Childs is dragged from her bed to the fire-wrecked property on Cross Farm Lane. Three bodies discovered, a family obliterated, and their deaths all seem to point to one conclusion - one mother, one murderer. But DC Childs realises it is the fourth body, the one they cannot find, that holds the key to the mystery. Her determination to unmask the murderer might cost her the thing she cares about most: her career.

November, 1957: Six teenage girls walk in the churning Derbyshire mists. Their voices carrying across the fields, they follow the old train tracks into the dark tunnel of the Cutting. Only five appear on the other side. October, 2014: a dying mother, feverishly fixated on a friend from her childhood, makes a plea: 'Find Valerie.' Mina's elderly mother had never discussed her childhood with her daughter before. So who was Valerie? Where does her obsession spring from? DC Connie Childs is partnered up with new arrival to Bampton, Peter Dahl.