The day he was taken, the memories are distorted. Sepia photographs of smiling boys, silver cups with purple ribbons, the school smells of changing rooms and the canteen. The shock of a hand over his mouth, the terror and the crying. Those memories are a giant stain, a spill of darkness which wiped out everything before.

He closes his eyes, remembering the blackness of that first confinement. When he opens them, he focuses on the picture of the purple heather, making himself think of the peaty scent of the moors in August bloom.

‘They put in me in different cars,’ he says. ‘They kept changing cars and sometimes the driver. One of them had tattoos.’

‘What kind of tattoos?’

‘I couldn’t see very well. It was really dark by then. I saw them on his neck when he gave me a drink. I drank it and then they made me get back in the boot. I was really cold and shivering. Sometimes I could hear music on the radio, and sometimes I could hear them talking, but only bits.’

The woman from Social Services looks close to tears.

‘Is there anything you can remember them saying from that day they took you?’ asks Rose. ‘Anything about where you were going?’

Evan looks down at the table, thinking.

‘Only strange things. I think they must have given me drugs in the drink. One of them was talking about someone who’d bought a spider. I don’t like spiders. It made me think there might be spiders in the boot.’

Rose shudders.

‘I don’t like spiders either. You’ve done really, really well, Evan. Shall we finish for today?’

‘Will you let me know when you find Liam?’ Evan asks.

‘I’ll let you know personally,’ Rose promises.

As she’s gathering up her folder, she recalls something which struck her.

‘When you were talking about the names – Mr Rusty and Brian – you said we, Evan. So we wouldn’t know. Are you saying you weren’t alone in this place?’

Evan doesn’t want to be misleading.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I never saw any other children. It could have been next door, or in the room above. It was just that sometimes, I thought I could hear a girl crying.’

As they drive away from Harrogate police station, Claire represses all the questions she’d like to ask, which are essentially no more than social niceties – how did you get on, are you OK? Those are questions none of them must ask, which she, in one way, welcomes, since she certainly wants no details of the conversations in that room. And she appreciates it’s a relief to Evan to know that once he’s left the police station, the subject isn’t coming back, at least not today. Not until the phone rings again with another request for him to attend.