His head reared back slightly in a gesture of incomprehension. ‘How would I do that? I don’t know their numbers. They’re all in her phone, not written down anywhere. I mostly don’t even know their names.’ He waved a hand in the air. ‘And there’s no way to look up, like, “Dawn from work”, or “Megan from the gym”, or “Laura that I was at school with”.’ He had a point, she realised. It used to be when someone went missing, you checked their address book, their diary, the list of numbers by the phone. Now everybody carried their whole lives around with them and when they disappeared, so did the means of tracking them.

‘No relatives you could call?’

Torin shook his head. ‘My gran lives in Bristol with my auntie Rachel. Mum hasn’t spoken to my dad this year, and anyway, he’s doing a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He’s an army medic.’ A note of pride, Paula thought.

‘What about work? Did you think of ringing there?’

He glowered. ‘They only answer the outside line during regular opening hours. In the evening, the pharmacy’s just for hospital emergency prescriptions. So even if I’d rung, nobody would have picked up.’

Paula cast her mind back to her own early teens and wondered how unnerved she’d have felt if her staid and respectable parents had gone inexplicably AWOL. In the circumstances, she thought Torin was doing pretty well not to lose control in the face of what probably felt like pointless questions that only served to slow down the process of finding his mother. It was that understanding of other people’s points of view that had helped Paula develop her skills as an interviewer. Now she needed to keep Torin on side, make him feel someone cared about his plight so she could extract enough information to do something useful.

‘So what did you do?’

Torin blinked fast and furious. Ashamed or upset, Paula wasn’t sure which. ‘I went on my Xbox and played Minecraft till I was tired enough to go to sleep. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘You did well. A lot of people your age would have panicked. So what happened this morning?’