Of course, the house should have been searched already by whoever had been given her original notes. Paula suspected that Bev had been identified as low risk, the lowest rung on the ladder of missing persons. A by-the-book classification – ‘no apparent threat of danger to either the subject or the public’ – that would allow the officer concerned to put Bev on the bottom of the pile for someone else to pick up on the morning shift. They might not search the house at all at this stage. If Paula had been in charge, she’d have opted for an assessment of medium risk and not simply because Bev was a mate. The manual said, ‘The risk posed is likely to place the subject in danger,’ and she thought Bev slotted right into that category. Women like Bev did not go missing voluntarily. She tried not to dwell on the single sentence capitalised and highlighted in its own box near the start of the missing person protocol – ‘If in doubt, think murder.’

There was a corner of her professional mind that had already been thinking precisely that.

She made a note of the time in her pocket book and stepped inside. The first phase was the Open Door search. Her former colleague Kevin Matthews used to call it the ‘Don’t-discount-the-bleeding-obvious search’. They all remembered unnerving cases where missing kids had turned up hidden in obscure corners of houses and flats, sometimes off their own bat. But more often at the hands of others. So Paula made her way through the house, checking every room and cupboard, every cubbyhole and boxed-in space big enough to accommodate a woman of Bev’s dimensions. And as anticipated, she drew a blank.

She expected the next phase to be more productive. Now she would sweep the house in a quest for anything that would give her the inside track on Bev’s life. Notes, diaries, phones, photos, computers. Torin had his own tablet with him; he’d said Bev never used it and he never touched her laptop, not now they’d got a wireless printer he could command from his own machine. She’d already spotted the laptop on the desk in the cubbyhole office Torin had described, but she didn’t want to fuck that up for the techies. Time to call in a favour.

Paula took out her phone and checked the time before she keyed in the call. Half past nine wasn’t too late to call a woman who spent her spare time communing with the digital world. To her surprise, it took four rings before Stacey answered. ‘Paula, hello, what’s going on?’