In the centre of the board, she stuck a black-and-white copy of a photograph Valerie had given them. Lucy had taken it last year, she said, May or June, when the girls had done a day trip to London. They’d had lunch in a park, and the photo showed Becca at a picnic table, a big pot of salad in front of her. The sun was shining, and she was wearing a V-neck T-shirt, grey in the copy, pale green in the original, and a chain with a silver feather that hung over her sternum, its tip pointing down into the groove between her breasts. Her sunglasses were pushed back into her hair and you could see she was about to laugh, her lips pressed together in a way that looked urgent. There was a bottle of lemonade in her hand – she had her mouth full and was struggling to swallow before she laughed and sprayed it everywhere. ‘That’s her,’ Valerie had said. ‘Her spirit.’

‘Friends and associates.’ Maggie stuck up smaller pictures of Harry, Lucy and Nick, then drew another line and wrote ‘Steven Cotton, aka Stevo’. She circled it, wrote ‘morphine’ underneath.

On the left side of the board, she wrote ‘Hanley’s’ and ‘The Spot’ then stood back. ‘So.’

‘We need to find out how far into it she was, obviously. Where she was getting it if it wasn’t from Stevo, who she was doing it with, if anyone.’

‘Yep.’ Maggie wrote, marker squeaking.

‘Whether this was why she was working at The Spot – for the money. Or if there was another connection there – someone she was buying from or with.’

‘The Spot generally,’ Maggie said, turning. ‘The past six months since September. So she starts her job there, apparently to start saving for a holiday, but it’s a pretty hard-core way of getting a bit of money together, don’t you think? Three shifts a week plus the extra ones at Christmas the Aussie barman mentioned – that’s a lot when you’ve got a full-time day job. How much money did she need?’

‘Lucy did say she wanted to go somewhere proper.’

‘Bali, at that rate.’

‘If she wasn’t spending it as fast as she was earning it.’ Robin bit a hangnail at the side of her thumb. ‘But I agree – The Spot feels significant. It was why she told Nick she had to break up with him, and the Aussie said the girls were close, right?’

‘“Thick as thieves”.’

‘Yeah. Was she hanging out with them instead of Lucy because of the drugs?’

Maggie was writing quickly.

‘I’m also still interested in the fact that Becca wanted to keep the Harry thing secret. Maybe I’m the weirdo here, maybe other people would be as chilled as he claims to be, respecting her decision and all that, but I don’t know.’

On the line between him and Becca, Maggie wrote Secret. ‘Definitely bears further questioning.’