But Tony wasn’t listening. Now he had advanced into the kitchen area, he’d spotted a corkboard on a short section of wall that jutted into the room. The board had been obscured from sight when he’d been in the main part of the room. He made straight for it and stared at it, frowning as if he was cataloguing the contents for the crime-scene equivalent of Kim’s Game. ‘This is more like it,’ he said.

Three takeaway menus – Indian, Chinese and catch-all pizza, kebab and burger. He turned and glanced round the kitchen area. ‘She cooked. You can smell it, you can see it from the pans and the knives and stuff. And there’s vegetables in the rack. Onions, potatoes, carrots, garlic. OK, the onions and potatoes are sprouting and the carrots are as wrinkled as a Shar Pei’s scrotum…’

‘That’s probably because, one way or another, she left here three weeks ago,’ Paula interrupted.

He nodded. ‘She worked hard, she worked late. She didn’t always have time to cook.’

‘Maybe she couldn’t be bothered.’

‘Take a look in the cupboards,’ he said, anticipating open packets of ingredients, jars of herbs and spices, tins he’d have no idea what to do with.

Paula revealed exactly what he’d expected. ‘You win. She cooked.’ She picked an open cardboard box off the shelf and peered inside. ‘Now I know the Polish word for lentils.’ While she was on this theme, she opened the fridge. It smelled of over-ripe cheese and bad fruit and the plastic bottle in the door shelf was solid with spoiled milk. ‘Well, that’s one question answered. I don’t believe she ever went to Poland. She’d never have left all this food to go off in the fridge. She certainly didn’t come home at the weekend just in time to be abducted. At the very least she’d have binned this rotten stuff.’

Tony turned his attention back to the corkboard. A postcard from Ibiza. He unpinned it. ‘Sun shining, booze cheap, plenty guys!!! You should have come. Ashley xxx’ He replaced it. Business cards from a computer repair shop, a Polish deli in Harriestown, a dressmaker specialising in alterations and a taxi firm. The police would check them all, he knew. Chances were high that they would lead nowhere. Although Ashley might be able to colour in some of the background to Nadia’s life.

There were a couple of flyers for upcoming pub gigs by local bands, a bus timetable for the 183 from Harriestown to Bellwether Square and a cartoon about Polish builders. Finally, he turned his attention to the photographs. A dog-eared and faded colour snap of a wedding party – bride and groom and two presumed sets of parents. ‘Her mum and dad?’

‘No reason to think otherwise.’