‘I’m putting him in me mum’s cowshed,’ said Dominic.

‘I thought the council wanted that knocked down?’ said Cole.

‘They haven’t got round to it yet,’ he said.

‘At least it will be a short commute,’ said Cole. ‘And it’ll be good to have somebody near at hand overnight. Means I can get back to my kids.’

‘You think this is going to drag out?’ I asked.

‘Who can tell?’ she said, which meant yes.

‘Do you think we’re going to get them back?’

‘I hope so,’ she said, which meant no.

She took another swig of water and wiped her forehead with the back of her arm.

‘We’d better get you briefed and introduced,’ she said.

The Marstowes lived in one half of a semi built in the watered-down neo-Georgian style that was de rigueur for post-war rural housing developments. Situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was, Dominic told me, the last actual council-owned council house in the village. All the rest having been bought up by their tenants in the 1980s and 1990s and then sold on to wealthy incomers.

‘Except for your mum,’ I said.

‘She didn’t want to sell,’ he said. ‘Now of course she looks like a bloody genius – prices being what they are.’

Judging from the decomposing grey VW Rabbit and the empty Calor Gas bottles amongst the long unmown grass of the front garden, the Marstowes were either hoping for a spot on the next Channel 4 deprivation documentary or a two-page spread in the Daily Mail. Although to clinch the Mail story they’d probably have to adopt a Romanian asylum seeker or something. On the other side of a box hedge the front garden of the other half of the semi was a neat lawn without flower beds. The windows on that side were closed up and doors were shut tight, and it had a blank empty aspect. The owner-occupier, a senior lecturer at Birmingham University had been amongst the first locals to be TIEed after the girls went missing. That’s Traced, Identified and Eliminated, in case you were wondering.

‘At his holiday villa in Tuscany,’ Dominic had told me. He’d been there since the end of the July.

‘A Tuscan villa and a weekend house in the country?’ I’d asked. ‘How much does he get paid?’

Apparently he’d planned to move his family out to Rushpool, but his wife had divorced him when she found him with an undergraduate discussing Borges’ pivotal role in the development of post-colonial literature with the aid of a feather duster, a latex vest and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Brownie-flavoured ice cream.

I asked whether the wife or the undergraduate had joined him in Tuscany.

‘Wife and kids,’ Dominic said. ‘And the undergraduate.’