I shook my head. One child in a duffel coat with a fifty-pence mask from the newsagents looked much the same as another child in a duffel coat wearing a fifty-pence mask. I wanted to remember, but I couldn’t. I could see my mother’s face illuminated by the pale glow of the street light outside our house. She looked as scared as she sounded. Grown-ups weren’t supposed to get scared. They were supposed to make it better.

‘I don’t know, Mammy,’ I told her, and I was shaking now myself.

What if something bad had happened? Something really bad? We’d all heard stories of children going missing only to turn up dead later. Was that what had happened to Kelly? Had someone taken her?

I heard more voices join in the chorus calling her name in the street. My mother sat on my bed and took my hand in hers, but her eyes were at the window. She flinched every time someone called Kelly’s name and was met only with silence as their reply.

I watched as she made the sign of the cross. ‘Jesus was lost, and Jesus was found,’ she muttered over and over.

All I could think was that Kelly Doherty’s face was going to be staring out at us all from the front of the newspapers in the way all those missing children’s faces had been. What if someone was hurting her right now?

The sound of footsteps making their way down a hallway, on expensive tiling, pulls me from my memories and the door to Ryan’s house opens. Jen greets me with a smile that doesn’t quite go all the way to her eyes. She is drying her hands on a tea towel and there is a trace of flour in her hair. She’s been baking. Of course. She’s the type to bake.

I can’t help but notice she looks tired. I’m not used to seeing her looking anything other than perfectly presented. She’s not a stupid woman. She always treats me with suspicion, which is understandable in the circumstances. I’m not sure she knows that Ryan and I have had sex, more than once, but I imagine that living with a man like Ryan, you soon come to suspect every woman who is vaguely well presented. Ryan has a reputation that precedes him, and it’s not that of a brilliant editor.

‘Ingrid, what can we do for you?’ Her eyebrows knit together in faux concern. ‘Ryan told me there’d been some unpleasantness and that awful business last night with Liam Doherty. Dear me, what is the world coming to?’

‘It’s terrible,’ I concede, mirroring her painted-on concern. ‘But I need to see Ryan, if he’s in. About some breaking news. One he’ll want published on the website as soon as possible.’