The door to what must be the living room was shut. From the other side of this door he heard it again: the cough, and then the faint crying sound of a baby. He couldn’t figure out why it was so faint. It sounded like it was locked in a box.

He held up three fingers, then counted them down: three, two, one.

He went in, calling, ‘Police.’

He swept the room with his torch. A figure sat slumped in the corner, cloaked in darkness, not moving. Beside the figure, a pram – the old-fashioned sort. And from within the pram came the muted baby’s cry.

He thought the figure in the corner was unconscious from the way the head drooped – until it jumped up and screamed at them.

Words leapt over one another, barely legible, but two words stood out from the jumble: My baby. My baby.

He shone the light into the face of a woman, an old woman with lines clawed in her face by decades of rough living, crooked yellow teeth, the witch from Hansel and Gretel brought to life. ‘Not my baby!’ she screamed, pulling the plastic doll from the pram and clutching it against her.

Patrick had figured it out almost as soon as he’d entered the room.

‘Hello, Martha,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to hurt your baby.’

Five minutes later, Patrick and Carmella were back in the car.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Carmella said. ‘But when she jumped up and started screaming at us, I almost sprang a leak.’

Martha – no-one knew her surname, or if Martha was even her real first name – was well known in the area. The locals sometimes called her Mother Hubbard or just the Crazy Baby Lady. She could often be seen pushing her ancient pram, mostly in and around the cemetery, a pram that contained many dolls plus one particularly life-like one that Martha treated as if it was a real baby. Her child. She had been around for all of Patrick’s career – a decade and a half. Despite appearing to be insane, and to fully believe that the doll was real, she had been replacing its batteries for years, so it continued to cry and occasionally say ‘Mama.’

‘Any idea why she’s like that?’ Carmella asked.

Patrick switched on the car lights. It was beginning to rain, a light summer drizzle come to gently wash the streets. ‘There are lots of rumours. That she lost her baby in a house fire, or that she accidentally let her own child drown in the bath. Who knows? Maybe she never had a real baby of her own.’

‘So sad.’

Patrick nodded. ‘I really need to sleep,’ he said, as much to himself as Carmella.