‘My darling, this is so terrible.’ Julie sits down and wraps her arms around her. ‘Tell me what happened, sweetheart.’ She takes Alison’s hands. ‘You’re freezing. Jamie can you fetch your mum a blanket, please?’

‘I fed him three ounces of milk and laid him in his crib. Then I went downstairs and made up one more ounce because he wouldn’t settle. But he’d quietened down, so I lay on the sofa for a minute, thinking he might start crying again, but he didn’t. I must have dozed off.’

‘Then he has to be in the house, he can’t just disappear.’

The thought of Adam flips over in Alison’s mind. ‘But the front door was open and I definitely locked it. The key is hanging in its usual place.’

‘Oh God, Ali, do you think it was Adam?’

The sound of a car door slamming sends Julie to the kitchen to check out of the window. ‘The police are here,’ she calls.

Alison takes a deep breath, wipes her eyes on the little vest and meets them in the hall. Inspector Fay Downy introduces herself, followed by PC Blunt. They ask to see the room Charlie went missing from.

‘And this is how you found the bedroom?’ the inspector asks.

Alison nods. Seeing the room in the emerging daylight makes her start shaking again. Julie takes a blanket from Jamie, places it around Alison’s shoulders and helps her back downstairs, while the police search the rest of the house.

Afterwards, they all sit at the kitchen table and Alison runs through what happened. Julie quietly makes tea and brings it over.

‘You say you locked the front door. Could you have forgotten to do that last night or left it in such a way that it could blow open?’ the inspector asks.

Alison shakes her head. ‘I always lock it in the evening and so I know I’ve done it, I hang the key up. If it was unlocked, I’d have left the key in the door.’

‘Okay, that makes sense. So, someone with a key must have come in. Can you think who that would be? A relative perhaps who, with all good intentions, has taken Charlie out to give you a break and not clicked the door shut properly? Your mum, perhaps, or the child’s father?’

Alison glances at Julie. Would he come in the middle of the night? She presses her hands to her cheeks. For several moments everyone is silent, waiting for her to speak. ‘I can only think of Sandra over the road, who does my ironing. And Adam, their dad.’

‘Absent father?’

Alison nods. ‘He upped and left about six weeks ago.’ Jamie snuggles into her side.

Julie gently squeezes Alison’s forearm.

‘And he still has a front door key?’

‘Yes, he does.’