He leaned forward and read the words from the obvious nutcase who’d contacted Helen. Clearly the work of some sad sack who lived on her own with a dozen semi-feral cats and the crime channels playing all day long. Winkler’s own mum bought all of those real life mags and cut out her favourite stories – all the ones about child abuse and honeymoon murders and ritual killings by love rats and wicked stepfathers. She was always on Facebook, calling for the castration of some child murderer or the torture and slow death of a woman who’d put a cat in a wheelie bin. There were millions of them out there: Winkler had heard something on the radio about it, about how these people were ‘punishers’, how they played an important role in society but the internet had allowed them to get out of control. Helen’s troll was worse – she actually wanted to make contact with victims, maybe even believed in her twisted mind that the kids who lived happily with their parents next door were actually kidnap victims.

‘Fascinating,’ he said, biting down on a yawn.

‘Do you think there’s any truth in it?’ Helen asked. She had that wide-eyed I want to believe look but she wasn’t thick.

‘I’m going to look into it,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

‘But do you think it will lead anywhere?’

‘Mrs Philips, I don’t want to get your hopes up. But I’m going to need you to give me your Facebook log-in details so I can make contact with this woman and try to track her down, find out who she is.’

‘Really? My log-in?’

He nodded. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to go poking anyone you don’t want me to.’

That didn’t raise a smile. But she very reluctantly said, ‘OK,’ and wrote them down for him on a scrap of paper.

‘It won’t take me long,’ he said. ‘As soon as I’m done, I’ll let you know and you can change your password. In the meantime, don’t make contact with her, OK?’

She looked a bit sick, but that might have been desperation to find her daughter. He said, ‘Right, I’ll be in touch, then.’

‘Thank you.’