It’s clear when I get there that Jen, and quite possibly the two boys, too, are home. Despite the cold day, there is a bike lying on its side on the grass to the front of the house. Jen’s car – a Volvo 4x4 beast of a thing that there is no need for when all you do is drive around city streets – is parked at the top of the driveway, with Ryan’s car behind it.

Their house has been decorated for Halloween. Jen is the perfect homemaker. Even though I’m thirty-five I have been known to say I’d like to be just like her when I grow up. Ryan doesn’t find the quip particularly amusing.

Pumpkin-shaped fairy lights twinkle from the windows. Yellow fake crime scene tape criss-crosses along the front door. Small ghost-shaped decorations dance in the breeze and a skeleton is perched on the front step beside a freshly carved pumpkin.

There are still five days until Halloween – the insides of that pumpkin will have well and truly started to rot by then, I think before pressing the doorbell. The usual ring of the doorbell has been replaced by a spooky cackle for the Halloween season. We’ve all become so Americanised. A far cry from our home-made costumes and plastic bags filled with nuts and apples.

A voice in my head tells me ours were simpler times, but then, of course, I remember Kelly. I remember that night. My mother shaking me from my sleep, asking if I knew where Kelly was. Had I seen her?

I’d shaken my head. Too tired to realise the significance of what I was being asked.

‘Think, Ingrid. Think!’ my mother had implored, and that’s when I’d registered the worry and the fear in her voice.

I’d been asleep and I hadn’t gone to bed ’til gone ten o’clock. That meant it was late, and certainly much too late for Kelly Doherty not to be home or for no one to know where she was. I heard a male voice call her name in the street. I blinked, trying to wake up.

‘I saw her earlier when we were out collecting. She was at the top of the street. But then my feet got soaked in that puddle and I came home to change my socks and put on my wellies,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t see her after that.’

‘And who was she with when you saw her?’