Her voice trailed away, her mouth trembled, and for the first time she looked Strike directly in the eye.

“I don’t really know why I asked you to come,” she confessed. “It’s all confused in my head. They said she wrote to you but you never wrote back and then you got sent her—her—”

“It must have been an appalling shock to you,” said Strike, fully aware that anything he could say would understate the case.

“It’s been—” she said feverishly “—terrible. Terrible. We didn’t know anything, anything at all. We thought she was on a college placement. When the police came to the door—she said she was going away with college and I believed her, some residential placement at a school. It sounded right—I never thought—but she was such a liar. She lied all the time. Three years she’s been living with me and I still haven’t—I mean, I couldn’t get her to stop.”

“What did she tell lies about?” asked Strike.

“Anything,” said Hazel, with a slightly wild gesture. “If it was Tuesday she’d say it was Wednesday. Sometimes there was no point to it at all. I don’t know why. I don’t know.”

“Why was she living with you?” Strike asked.

“She’s my—she was my half-sister. Same mum. We lost Dad when I was twenty. Mum married a guy from work and had Kelsey. There were twenty-four years between us—I’d left home—I was more like an auntie to her than a sister. Then Mum and Malcolm had a car crash out in Spain three years ago. Drunk driver. Malcolm died outright, Mum was in a coma for four days and then she passed, too. There isn’t any other family, so I took Kelsey in.”

The extreme tidiness of their surroundings, the cushions on their points, surfaces clear and highly polished, made Strike wonder how a teenager had fitted in here.

“Me and Kelsey didn’t get on,” said Hazel, again seeming to read Strike’s thoughts. Tears flowed once more as she pointed upstairs, where Ray had gone to bed. “He was much more patient with all her moodiness and her sulks. He’s got a grown-up son who’s working abroad. He’s better with kids than me. Then the police come jack-booting in here,” she said on a sudden rush of fury, “and tell us she’s been—they start questioning Ray like he’d—like he’d ever, in a million years—I said to him, it’s like a nightmare. You see people on the news, don’t you, appealing for kids to come home—people put on trial for things they never did—you never think… you never think… but we never even knew she was missing. We’d have looked. We never knew. The police asking Ray questions—where he was and I don’t know what—”

“They’ve told me he didn’t have anything to do with it,” Strike said.

“Yeah, they believe that now,” said Hazel through angry tears, “after three men told them he was with them every minute of the stag weekend and showed them the bloody photos to prove it…”