“I’m looking for Tahlia,” Rosie said, keeping things simple. The last time she’d inadvertently interviewed a witness, Steph hadn’t taken kindly to it. “According to Kyle’s friends, she dated him for a short while, but then she and her father had an altercation about a relationship with a girl. Is that right?”

Melissa had wrung the tea towel into a tight line, her knuckles blanching around the cloth. She glanced at the mantelpiece, where a matched set of family photographs took up most of its length. Without waiting for permission, Rosie stood and went over to pick up a photo of a young girl in a smart school uniform. She was holding a One Hundred Percent Attendance certificate and grinning ear to ear.

“Is this Tahlia?” Rosie asked.

Melissa nodded, her eyes brimming with tears. “She’s just a baby,” she whispered. “And we can’t find her anywhere.”

Rosie took the photo back to the sofa, propping it on the coffee table where Melissa couldn’t avoid it. She’d assumed this would be a five-minute “Tahlia’s not here and good riddance to her” type of house call, but Melissa’s statement had set alarm bells ringing.

“What do you mean, you can’t find her?” she asked. “Have you been looking for her?”

Melissa pulled a tissue from an ornate metal box. “Day and night. My husband is a taxi driver, and he’s been searching for her between fares. He was so angry with her over that girl, but he didn’t mean for this. He would never—” She began to sob, hiding her face in her hands.

“How long has she been missing?”

“Today is the seventeenth day.” A terrible hollowness to Melissa’s voice gave Rosie an idea of the toll those days had taken. “We know she stayed with Demi-Lee for a while. We spoke to Demi-Lee’s mum, and we thought she’d come home of her own accord, but she never did.”

“Why haven’t you reported her missing, Mrs. Mansoor? She’s only fourteen.”

The question prompted a fresh bout of tears. “I know! I know that!” Melissa grabbed the photo and held it to her chest. “Faisal said he would find her, that you would blame him if we told you, and our other children would be taken away as well. We kept hoping she would walk through the front door and we could pretend this had never happened.”

Rosie bullet-pointed the answer, careful now with her record of the visit. If Tahlia’s disappearance ended as badly as Kyle’s, she didn’t want to be the weak link in the evidence chain.

“What did you tell her school?” she asked. Any prolonged, unexplained absence would have been investigated, had some kind of reason not been given.