Nicole’s own room was bigger than the master bedroom, but an awkward long shape that hinted of two rooms that had been knocked together. It was pleasingly not-pink, but instead wallpapered with subtle lemon yellow and light blue stripes. The furniture was expensive but modern and had taken some punishment around the legs and corners. Again not much in the way of books, just the rest of the Harry Potter set and what looked like textbooks on the fold-down desk. Much less in the way of furry mascots, but stray bits of Lego had worked their way into gaps between the chest of drawers and the skirting board. An obvious gap where the High-Tech Crime unit had had it away with her laptop. A poster of Hunger Games over the bed – Jennifer Lawrence taking aim down the length of an arrow.

I pulled out one of the Harry Potters. It was practically mint, probably unread. I put it back and decided that there wasn’t anything useful here.

‘I understand why you have to do these things,’ said Victoria Lacey from behind me – I turned to find her in the doorway. ‘I really wish you didn’t have to.’

‘So do I, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Did Nicole have a Kindle or any other kind of eReader?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

‘They can get emails and other social media,’ I said. ‘A lot of people don’t realise that. We need to ensure we haven’t overlooked any avenues of communication that might have existed between Nicole and other people.’

‘When you say “other people” you mean paedophiles, don’t you?’

Her lips clamped shut on the end of the sentence. I could see she was trying to say the unthinkable in the hope it wouldn’t be true – it’s a sort of magic thinking, but unfortunately not the kind that works.

‘Not just paedophiles,’ I said. ‘Undesirable contacts, estranged parents, dealers, gang members, that sort of thing.’ Christ, I thought. Talk about scant comfort.

‘That’s your speciality in London, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Gang violence, that sort of thing.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I check for things that other officers overlook.’

‘Because there aren’t any gangs out here,’ she said. ‘I mean, apart from the Travellers and I suppose some of the Poles, but then they don’t live around here as such.’ She stopped and stared at me for a moment. ‘This is a good place to bring up kids, you know. Not like London. I mean, anything can happen in London.’

I asked her if she’d grown up in London herself, but she said she came from Guildford.

‘But I lived in London for a couple of years. Before I met Derek,’ she said. ‘He’s from here. I’m from off. That matters up here. But I suppose in London everyone’s from off.’