Ashley’s eyes brimmed with tears and she started to shake. Paula put an arm round her shoulders and let her sob. Her eyes met Fielding’s. Any suggestion of sympathy had disappeared. Her boss made a rolling gesture with her hand; hurry it up. Fuck that. Paula let Ashley cry, finding a packet of tissues in her pocket to wipe her eyes and blow her nose when the first storm had passed. ‘I’m s-s-sorry,’ Ashley hiccuped, smudged mascara giving her racoon eyes.

‘Don’t be. She was your friend. It’s right to feel upset.’ Paula sat back but kept a hand on Ashley’s arm. ‘So, tell me when you last saw Nadia.’

Ashley gulped and swallowed, then managed to speak. ‘It was a Saturday.’ She counted back, her lips moving silently. ‘Three weeks ago. We went down Manchester to go shopping at the Trafford Centre. They’ve got, like, a load of cool shops there. We met up with Anya – that’s our other mate, Anya Burba. She’s Polish, like Nad. Anyhow, we met up at Burger King at noon and had a burger then we went round the shops.’ She stopped, smitten by memory, her bottom lip quivering.

‘Did you buy anything?’ Paula sounded chatty, interested in the shopping rather than the sinister.

‘I got some purple jeggings and a sequinned top to match. Nad got two blouses for work. A yellow one and a blue one. They had, like, a white pinstripe. They were really pretty, she looked lush in them. Anya, she got some stuff out of Body Shop. Bath stuff. She’d live in the bath, give her half a chance. Then we went to the food court and had chips and Cokes. Then Anya gave me a lift home. ’Cause Nad decided she wanted to see this movie that me and Anya didn’t fancy.’

There was always a moment in an interview when the witness said something whose significance wasn’t obvious to them. The trick was not to show that it mattered. Paula had to struggle to keep her hand from gripping Ashley’s hand tightly, as if she could squeeze information from her. ‘What film was that?’

Ashley shrugged. ‘Dunno, really. It was something French. Nad, she speaks French as well as English. It had subtitles, like, but I’d rather watch the telly or go down the pub. If I wanted to read all night, I’d buy, like, a magazine.’

‘So Nadia was planning to go to the cinema alone?’

‘Yeah. She did that sometimes. She was into films, way more than me and Anya.’

It made sense. Paula remembered a couple of French films in the stack of DVDs in Nadia’s flat. ‘And she was happy to go by herself?’

‘Yeah, why not?’

‘And you’re sure she hadn’t made plans to meet anyone there?’