The dual carriageway was empty as she’d trudged along it with her head down. Her backpack had felt as though it was full of paving slabs, even though it actually only contained a few clothes, her passport, phone and iPad and chargers. Tears of fury were dripping off her nose, mingling with the sweat on her face. She licked her top lip and tasted the salty drops. When she’d checked her watch she had seen that it was one thirty in the morning. Would they have noticed she’d gone yet? They wouldn’t care, even if they had. She hated them all: Helen, Eileen, her dad – they all blamed her! Her two best mates had deserted her: Larry by refusing to come with her, and as for Georgia, she’d tried to talk to her, but she was just being really selfish at the moment. How could Georgia be so worried about her folks cutting off her allowance, when her best friend’s little sister had been kidnapped? The tears of fury turned into tears of outrage.

Alice thought of her squidgy little sister, her soft feet and tiny pearly teeth, the way she giggled in the bath and the smell of the back of her neck when Alice nuzzled her head into it, and it made her cry harder. Oh god . . . it was all bound to come out, what they’d done. She shivered in the evening warmth, thinking about the consequences. About what her dad and Helen would say when they found out.

She’d walked for an hour towards Heathrow, thinking that she might have enough cash to jump on an Easyjet flight to Spain or somewhere, but hadn’t been convinced by that idea because that would leave a trail and make it easy for her dad to find her. But then she had an idea. There were loads of empty flats on the Kennedy Estate. As long as she kept well away from Jerome’s block of flats she should be OK.

Alice had pulled out her phone and risked switching it on, ignoring all the alerts for missed calls, voicemails and texts from her family that immediately appeared. So they’d noticed she’d gone? Astonishing, she thought, sarcastically. She knew she needed to be quick – they’d be able to trace her by her phone if she left it on for long. If they’d even alerted the police, which they might not have done. Maybe they’d think she’d been kidnapped by the same person who stole Frankie. The thought gave her a guilty little thrill, as she imagined her face on the ten o’clock news, filling the screen. Hopefully they’d use a nice picture of her, maybe that one of her in her sarong on holiday in Tuscany last year sipping a mocktail, hopefully not a naff old school photo in blazer and tie with hardly any make-up on . . .