‘Hannah said you could only see her when it was a full moon,’ said Joanne as she sat down with her own tea. ‘I remember because she insisted we have her bloody birthday party on that particular night.’

‘I wondered why you’d done that, and it went on so late,’ said Victoria.

‘The moon wasn’t up until past nine o’clock now, was it?’ said Joanne. ‘I thought they’d got that nonsense from that Hobbit film.’

‘I don’t remember a unicorn in The Hobbit,’ said Victoria.

‘No, it was the writing in that,’ said Joanne. ‘On the map.’

Victoria picked a thread off the shoulder of her blouse.

‘I don’t think I was paying that much attention,’ she said. ‘It all seemed rather daft.’

‘They made us take them to the film twice,’ said Joanne. ‘They were looking forward to the next one.’

Joanne sipped her tea and looked out of the window.

I took the opportunity to surreptitiously check the phases of the moon on my phone – April 26th had been a full moon.

‘I remember when they first went missing we thought they might have sneaked out to look at the moon,’ said Joanne. ‘Didn’t we, Vicky?’

That hadn’t been in their initial statements – I saw DS Cole blink.

Victoria nodded her head reluctantly.

‘Following the moon,’ said Joanne. ‘Just like last time.’

‘I think I will have a cup of tea now,’ said Victoria. ‘If that’s all right with you.’

‘Of course,’ said Joanne and got up.

‘They’d run away before?’ asked DS Cole about two seconds before I could wrap my head around the implications.

‘No,’ said Victoria. ‘Not Nicky and Hannah, they hadn’t, but they used to talk about it. As a game – following the moon.’

‘They had a song,’ said Joanne, extracting a teabag and flicking it into the sink – ‘In a minute soon we’ll run away to follow the moon.’

‘It doesn’t really scan, does it?’ said Victoria.

I asked some follow-up questions, but Victoria had been trying hard to ignore the whole ‘imaginary friend situation’ as she put it and Joanne had three boys under the age of ten and could rarely hear herself speak, let alone Hannah.