While Hamlet tucked in with enviable guilt-free gusto, I plonked myself down at the table and opened my laptop. Dawn was shining through my grubby kitchen window and suffusing the room with golden pink light, the summer continuing to hold a hot, dry finger up to climate change deniers.

If Violet’s birth mother was this woman Bex Smith, who turned out to be alive after all, could Violet be with her? But why not contact her family or friends? It seemed inconceivable that someone so connected wouldn’t get in touch with anyone.

I wanted to get a feel for Violet. Who she’d been before she became a case. A few years ago, missing people were like shadows. All the information about them came from others. Hearsay. We didn’t see them talking and, unless they wrote diaries, we never heard from them directly. This had all changed. The murdered and the missing were amongst us still, with their blogs and vlogs and social media presence. Violet had taken this to a new level. There was so much online, you could practically resurrect a virtual version of her, like an episode of Black Mirror. And since everyone interacted online anyway, it would be almost as if she’d never gone, although she might not be making any new bikini videos.

I went to the Great Meat Debate website and clicked through to one of Violet’s YouTube videos. She was cooking chops, wearing the trademark skimpy swimwear and the pelican brooch on a slim silver chain around her neck. Flat stomach, cellulite-free thighs. The evening sunshine cast a rose glow on her lightly tanned skin. I wondered what it would feel like to look like that. She probably took it for granted, like I did my uncanny ability to pass exams. I prayed to the imaginary friend I kept in my head for these purposes – please let her still be smooth-skinned and beautiful, not seething with maggots in a vat of pig guts.

Violet flashed a bright smile at the camera and chucked a sausage on the barbecue. She might not be contributing greatly to the sum of human knowledge, but she’d notched up several million views.

I clicked on another video, dated a week later. It was just as well we’d had a good summer – Violet was cooking again, in another bikini. Burgers this time. Music blared in the background and Violet danced along as she tended the barbecue. Halfway through, she reached for a vest-top and slipped it on over her bikini. It was bright pink, with the caption, This Sexy Bod was Built by Meat. The comments under the video were mainly enthusiastic, if on the sleazy side. Lower down the thread was the aggression. The assertions that she was a stuck-up bitch. The suggestions that she should try having her throat slit in an abattoir.