Next, three women, arms around each other, in a nightclub or a fun pub, all mugging drunkenly at the camera. The kind of photograph half the women in Britain under thirty had on display, commemorating some celebratory night out with the girls. Tony was about to pass on, but something nagged at him. He took the photo off the board and studied it more closely. ‘The one in the middle,’ he said. ‘She looks familiar. I can’t place her. She’s not someone I know. But I’ve met her somewhere.’ He looked up at Paula, whose expression was unreadable. ‘Do we know who she is?’

‘Oh yeah, Tony. We know exactly who she is. She’s the victim.’

His confusion was obvious. ‘That’s Nadia Wilkowa?’

19

Bev had no way of measuring how long she’d been conscious inside the freezer. She’d started trying to count the minutes, going from one elephant to sixty then back again, but she couldn’t keep track. Her mind was too busy skittering from one awful possibility to another. And beneath them all, the constant thrum of anxiety about Torin. How would he be coping without her? How would he cope if she never got back to him? Would he go to the police? Would they find her in time? She tried to push the worst of her imaginings away from her, but there was no escaping it. This wasn’t the kind of predicament that generally had a positive ending.

As well as losing all sense of time, Bev had also given up on dignity. She’d grown uncomfortably conscious of her full bladder but she’d held it in for as long as she could. Then she’d asked herself why she was bothering. She was locked in a chest freezer wearing nothing but a pair of pants that didn’t belong to her. There was nothing dignified in any of that. How could it be worse to be sitting in a puddle of her own piss? If it – literally – pissed off the person who’d put her in here, then score one to her.