The woman brought her hands back up and wrapped them round her mug as if it were a crystal ball. Plain gold wedding band, no engagement ring. Her nails were unpolished, cut short. In fact, all evidence suggested a complete lack of vanity. Her hair was cut in an unflattering pageboy, and she wore a pilled blue round-neck sweater and the sort of elasticated trousers sold from the back of Sunday supplements. If you saw her on the street, Robin thought, she’d barely register.

‘My daughter’s called Rebecca,’ she said. ‘Becca for short, never Becky – she hates Becky.’ A glimmer of a smile. ‘That’s her on the fridge, obviously. She was sixteen then – we went to Devon after her GCSEs.’

‘So now she’s twenty- …?’ said Robin.

‘Two. Her birthday’s in October.’

‘When did you last see her?’ asked Maggie.

‘Thursday. In the morning, before she went to work. Just before eight, like it always is.’

‘She lives here then? With you?’

Valerie nodded.

‘And have you heard from her at all since? Any calls, emails?’

‘No. Normally she texts me during the day – practical stuff, what’s for dinner – but that day, nothing. Then I found her phone upstairs.’

Robin sensed Maggie shift infinitesimally. ‘Where was it?’

‘On the floor, like she’d put it on the bed and it had fallen off. It was almost hidden by the valance – I called her from the landline down here and heard it ringing but I had to ring again to find it.’

‘How about her purse? Her handbag?’

‘She took those. She’d have needed her Swift card to get on the bus.’

‘And where’s the phone now?’

Valerie stood up and fetched it from the counter, a Samsung Galaxy in a sparkly mint-green case. They looked at it without picking it up.

‘Is it locked?’ said Robin.

Valerie Woodson nodded. ‘I don’t know the code. I’ve tried everything – her birthday, mine, her dad’s.’

‘Her dad is …?’

‘He’s dead. Graeme. He died when she was eight. Cancer.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Maggie.

‘Tell us about Thursday morning.’

‘It was … normal. I’ve been over and over it for anything unusual. She did go to work that day, I know that, because on Friday morning when her bed hadn’t been slept in and I found her phone, I rang the office to check she was okay. I got Roger, her boss, and he said she’d been there all day on Thursday and left as usual.’

‘But she wasn’t there then?’

‘No. He was about to call here, he said.’

‘Where does she work?’

‘In the Jewellery Quarter.’

The Jewellery Quarter. Robin felt a cold hand on the back of her neck.

‘A family silversmith,’ Valerie was saying, ‘Hanley’s. She’s been there since she finished her A-levels; they’ve encouraged her to go on, do book-keeping at college at night so she can take more on.’