‘It could be her,’ Patrick corrected him. ‘The woman in the sketch appears to have the same dark, frizzy hair, the same shaped face, similar features.’

‘The same cruel lips,’ Carmella interjected.

‘Very poetic, Carmella. Perhaps. But there are a lot of women who look like this.’

‘I’ve been out with a few of them,’ wisecracked a DC from the back of the room.

‘I need a detective to go through the CCTV from Sainsbury’s again, looking for Denise. Preet, can you do that please?’ He made a mental note also to ask Preet Gupta if she knew where Winkler, her supposed partner, had got to.

‘Also,’ Carmella continued, ‘Zoe McConnell said that she thought a man bumped her on her way into the supermarket, which was how we assumed she lost her car key.’

Patrick said, ‘Mike, can you talk to Mrs McConnell again, find out if she is certain the person who bumped her was a man? I don’t think she’d be mistaken about that though – in which case we can assume there were two of them working together. The man bumped Zoe, then passed the key to his female accomplice.’

Mike was deep in thought. ‘If McLean is out of prison now, which I guess he would be if it was ten years ago, maybe he and Denise have hooked up – he has a hold over her from when she was a kid. And now she’s helping him procure other kids . . . a cycle of abuse.’

‘It’s a theory,’ Patrick agreed.

With the room buzzing, Patrick explained what Denise had been doing at the Dads’ Club. He caught Carmella’s eye. ‘Let’s go and find Denise Breem.’

The Helping Hands Agency was based in a cramped, dingy office above a KFC in Whitton, the smell of fried chicken hanging in the air and making Patrick’s stomach growl. He told the woman who ran the agency, which provided temps for manual work – cleaning, menial factory work, jobs on building sites, and so on – who they were looking for and watched her press her lips together until they turned white.

‘Hounding that poor woman, are you?’ The owner, Sarah Mason, was in her early fifties with dyed pillar-box-red hair.

‘You know about her past?’

‘Yeah, of course. She told me all about how the police tried to stitch her up.’

‘And you sent her to work as a cleaner at a club for children?’

Sarah Mason’s eyes were full of contempt, a look that bounced off Patrick like a bullet off Kevlar. ‘She loves kids. Just because she made the mistake of going out with a scumbag.’ Her eyes watered, and Patrick understood why this woman felt empathy for Denise Breem. She saw them both as women who’d been let down by men, nothing more.

Carmella leaned in. ‘Ms Mason, we don’t have time to chat about this all day. We need to know where Denise is right now.’