Kath ran her hands through her hair, pulling it back against her skull. ‘I’ve been over and over it, we all have. The only thing that stands out is something he said at Easter last year. He mentioned a cash injection. We were washing up after lunch. I asked him about it and he got a bit flustered – as if he hadn’t meant to say anything and it’d slipped out. All he’d tell me was he’d borrowed against the machines. I said it sounded like a risk – if he couldn’t pay it back, he’d lose them – and he said yes but he’d had to.’ She shrugged, the gesture so like his she could have been acting out the memory.

‘He wouldn’t say who the loan was from?’

‘No. I asked, directly, but he went off on a tangent, started talking about how when things got going again, he’d replace some of the machines, have an overhaul, get costs down. It was deliberate – I remember saying to Gareth he didn’t want to tell me.’

‘Who do you think it might have been, if you had to guess?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘A bank?’

‘No. Not a bank.’ Kath looked her in the eye. ‘He would have told me. At the time I worried it was one of those dodgy pay-day loans places with the exorbitant interest. Now I don’t know if it was even that legitimate. What if it was a loan shark, he couldn’t pay them back and …?’

‘You’ve told the police about this, obviously?’

‘Yes. They said they’d look into it but we haven’t heard any more.’

‘Okay. Can you think why he might have gone to Warwick?’

‘You mean his car?’

‘If it was him who took it there. Does he know someone there? A friend, a business associate?’

She shook her head. ‘No one we know.’

‘Kath,’ Robin felt her heart begin to beat faster, ‘had either of them ever been involved in something in the past that could have caught up with them?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. An accident, maybe – a hit-and-run?’

‘No. No way. They’d never do that, either of them. If they ever hit someone, they’d have stopped.’

‘I know.’ Her cheeks were burning. ‘I just want to be completely thorough.’ She tried to sound reassuring. Credible. ‘Did they still have their after-school babysitter? Ana?’

‘Yes. They’d cut her hours down, she was only doing two afternoons a week, but yeah. They were sharing her with another family at Peter’s school, she went to them the other three days. That was purely to save money – Josh did pick-up on those days.’

‘Have you spoken to her?’

‘No, but the police have. I don’t know if she told them very much – apparently she was very upset.’

‘Have you got her number?’

Kath’s look sharpened.