The other office on the ground floor was the fund-raising office. Jude explained that Seagull was kept on the wing by a mixture of local authority and national grants and charitable donations. The staff consisted of herself as administrator, a psychiatrist and a qualified nurse. They had an arrangement with a local inner-city group practice, and there were always a few biomedical sciences students from the university who were glad to help.

The first floor contained a couple of consulting rooms, two meeting rooms and a common room for the addicts who were living in. On the top floor, addicts in the early stages of kicking heroin sweated and moaned through the first weeks of their agony. If they made it through that, they moved on to a halfway house owned by the project, which tried to find them permanent jobs and homes well away from the temptations of their old stamping grounds. The whole place seemed clean and cheerful, if threadbare, and I thought that Moira could have done a lot worse for herself.

“We run an open door policy here,” Jude explained as we made our way back downstairs. “We have to. As it is, we have to turn more away than we can treat. But they’re free to go any time. That

I knew better than to ask about their success rate. It would only depress Jude to talk about it, and she seemed so happy to have a new volunteer on her hands I didn’t want to disappoint her any more than I was going to have to do anyway. As we reached the front door, I shook Jude’s hand and asked when I should turn up the following evening.

“Come about half past eight,” she said. “The meeting starts at seven, but we have a lot of confidential stuff to get through first. You’ll have to ring the bell when you get here because the front door’s locked at six.”

“Open door policy?” I queried.

“To keep people out, not in,” Jude pointed out with a wry smile. “See you then.”

“I can hardly wait,” I muttered under my breath as I walked down the path and headed back to the car. I felt a complete shit, having raised her hopes of finding another volunteer. Maybe I could pitch Jett into giving them a substantial donation once I’d reunited him with Moira. After all, he’d said he’d be happy to give everything he owned to get her back.