Max Hartley was something in the City, loaded, the kind of person who, according to common perception, had little devil’s horns beneath his hair and a pointy tail concealed beneath his Hugo Boss suit. The mother, Fiona, was a former catalogue model who counter-balanced her husband’s profession by organizing charity fund-raisers. They lived in one of the best postcodes in the country, the kind of place where nothing bad happened. The Hartleys never thought that their child would be taken from their front room in the middle of the afternoon, certainly not on a street like the one they lived on.

Two days later, June 4th, another child had been abducted. Liam McConnell was two, a cheeky, chunky little boy with poor eyesight that forced him to wear glasses. His mum, Zoe, had left him in the car in Twickenham Sainsbury’s car park, strapped into his child seat, after realizing she’d forgotten to pick up her dry cleaning. She was only gone for two minutes, she insisted, though Patrick was sure it was more like five, maybe more. The woman in front of her in the queue had been arguing about a stain on her cashmere cardigan and Zoe, a freelance marketing consultant, described how she’d shifted impatiently from foot to foot, eager to get back to the car, on the verge of abandoning the dry cleaning when it was finally her turn.

She had locked the car, could clearly remember the thunk as she depressed the central locking. But when she got back to her white Audi A4, the back door was open and Liam was gone. An hour later, when a uniform had asked to see the car key she hadn’t been able to find it. Then she remembered, on her way back into Sainsbury’s, bumping into a man who had almost knocked her over. The car key had been in her jacket pocket. Patrick was certain that the man who had bumped into her had taken the key – unless Zoe was making the whole thing up, that she had forgotten to lock the car and had concocted the story to stop her husband, Keith, who ran his own recruitment company, blaming her.