A few years ago, too weak with flu to change the channel, she’d seen a daytime TV programme about a woman who covered large plates with mosaic designs. Through the mental fog, Robin had watched her tweezer in the glass tiles, gluing each one carefully before going back to a heap for another. She hadn’t marked out the designs beforehand but worked from a template that the camera hadn’t shown, so that only towards the end, as she finished, had the viewer seen fish and reeds and silver eddies in water. It was like her job, Robin had thought, except the pictures she was left with were even uglier. And there were no tiles until she’d extracted them one by one from people who, on a scale from hesitant to kill-to-avoid-it, didn’t want to give them to her.

She checked her phone again. Just after getting here, she’d texted Lennie to ask how it was going but there’d been no response. Maybe she had a double lesson, hadn’t seen it yet.

Why hadn’t Corinna told her the factory was struggling? Or had she? Had she, Robin, just missed it? Three or four years ago, around the time the trouble at the factory had started, she now remembered, Rin had mentioned issues – customers slow to pay, competition from China – but then she’d stopped talking about it. Was that because Robin had never really engaged? Because she hadn’t, she admitted. She hadn’t taken it seriously because she thought they’d sort it out. They’d be fine, the factory would be fine, because, in the end, it always had been, hadn’t it?

But why hadn’t Rin told her about Josh’s depression? She’d never even alluded to it. Had he asked her not to out of some ridiculous sense of shame? Surely they were way past that, the three of them? And even if he had asked her not to, Corinna knew she could talk to Robin in total confidence.

A buzz on the pay-as-you-go, a text from Maggie: Nuttall checked back with hospitals: nothing. Good news, maybe: no one fitting Becca’s description had been admitted with an overdose. On the other hand, if she had overdosed, she hadn’t been brought in.

Movement in the rear-view: a silver 5 Series BMW cruising up the road behind. She kept her eyes down as it passed, looking up again once the driver was out of sight. They hadn’t bothered to change the plates. Seconds later, she heard the engine go into reverse, and the woman backed into an empty spot across the road, two car-lengths ahead. Pretending to text, Robin filled the phone with pictures: the car; the woman getting out, pressing the fob, looking back briefly as she tottered across the road to the salon, expensive-looking handbag hooked on her forearm.

She texted Maggie, Ladywood done.

Great, came the reply. Want to try Selly Oak?

Wilco.