It took a lot of questions, but by the end I thought I’d managed to filter out any of Zoe’s embellishments. Dressed in silver definitely. There was also almost certainly two other individuals present, but they ‘weren’t in the light’, so Zoe didn’t get a good look at them. Zoe said that they had communicated telepathically, for which I could find no evidence either way, and in any case she couldn’t remember what they’d talked about.

Nor could she be sure how long they’d talked for, but she did distinctly remember being given a drink which, disappointingly, tasted a lot like water. The next thing she remembered clearly was walking down the road near the top of Rush Lane and meeting her dad coming the other way in his car.

‘They went mental,’ she said. ‘Dad was yelling, and bloody Victoria had to be held back – that’s what I heard, anyway. The very next day my mum came and picked me up and took me away. I hadn’t seen her for months and suddenly she was there.’

Zoe sighed and shook her head.

‘Wasn’t like I hadn’t run away before,’ she said.

‘Why do you think the reaction was different that time?’

‘See,’ said Zoe and gave me a shy smile, ‘that time I took the baby with me.’

‘You took the baby?’

‘Now you sound just like them,’ she said. ‘It’s not like Dad or my “babysitter” were paying any attention.’

‘What about your close encounter?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t know there were going to be aliens now, did I?’ she said. ‘How could I have known that was going to happen?’

As attention-grabbing behaviour it was hard to beat. I had a horrible thought.

‘Did anything happen to the baby?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘I never let go of her.’

I thought about the gaps in Zoe’s memory.

‘Her eyes didn’t change colour, did they?’

‘You think lady Victoria muckety-muck would have missed that?’ said Zoe. She got up and started piling the tea things in the sink where presumably they would stay until the next Good Samaritan arrived. I’d pretty much got everything I was going to get from that interview, but I thought a follow-up might be in order – perhaps I’d bring Beverley along to see if that would loosen her up.