But by five past five, when the doors were shut, only three women between twenty-five and forty had walked through them, two of them together, friends, the other with a man who looked like her dad. None of them was Ana.

A car pulled alongside and a pregnant woman got out and unbuckled a little boy of about eighteen months from the back. Robin watched as he toddled inside the medical centre, holding his mother’s hand, then Googled ‘Serb Orthodox Vespers service length’ on her phone. Nothing formal but a couple of people on chatrooms suggested somewhere around forty-five minutes.

She took the photograph from her pocket, her thumb finding the short tear made by the drawing pin as she’d pulled it from the corkboard. It had been taken in the garden at Ana’s house, she recognized the bench and the fence, the backdrop of tall trees. Four women smiled for the camera, their arms around each other, all squinting slightly against the late-afternoon sunlight pouring over the roof of the house in front of them, Marta on the end, then Ana next to two women who looked alike – presumably the sisters she’d said shared a room.

It was a risk but again, what choice did she have? There’d be no more leads from Marta, and Will said Ana hadn’t been in touch about visiting Pete. Just in case it was specifically her whom Ana was ignoring, Robin had called her using the office landline when Maggie went to the loo and then from a phone box round the corner before she got in the car. Nothing. Each time, the phone rang then went to voicemail.

The energy of the encounter with Marta hadn’t completely subsided; it would be a challenge to sit still for three quarters of an hour. In an effort to distract herself – and assuage her guilt at bunking off surveillance of Michael Dixon – she tried to do some Internet research on her phone but she was too wired for painstaking work on a tiny screen. After a few minutes, she gave up and opened Games instead.

At twenty to five, Solitaire was swallowed by an incoming call. She did an actual double-take at the caller name then glanced up. Across the road, a blond man, one of the forty-somethings, was pinning the church doors open.

‘Gid?’

He was walking, soft sounds of movement layered against a background of passing cars, a distant siren. ‘Robin? It’s me.’

Yes, they have this thing called number recognition now, she nearly said, before some vestigial scrap of self-preservation yanked her back. ‘Hi.’

‘Look, I’m sorry about the weekend. I mean, I know you wouldn’t have done it – shown up like that – unless you were under pressure, so let’s forget it, okay? No hard feelings?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far.’ She’d intended it to sound jokey but it didn’t and actually, good.