Bonnie sighed with her whole body, spreading her little palms wide and letting them flop against her sides. She consulted her knitted Peppa toy. ‘We say yeh,’ she said reluctantly and allowed Patrick to kneel down and dress her. Then she brightened. ‘Daddy take me playgroup?’ Patrick smiled at the way she pronounced it; pwaygwoop.

‘I can’t, Bon-Bon, I’m sorry, not today. Daddy’s got to go back to work.’

He winced, anticipating the bank of TV cameras, the shouted questions, the barely suppressed hysteria – and then, inevitably, the way that the public would recognize him as ‘that cop off the news’ and hold him personally responsible for any lack of breakthrough or developments in the case . . . And then, the painful conversations he’d doubtless have to have with a panic-stricken Sean and Helen Philips.

‘Why?’ She squished his cheeks between her hands, forcing him to look in her eyes. She smelled so sweet, a mixture of soft baby skin and apple juice.

‘Because it’s my job, darling. I help people. And today I have to help the family of a little girl a bit like you.’ Only not dead, thank God.

‘I doan like your job.’

He smiled at her. ‘Sometimes I don’t much like it either, but I have to do it. Now, let’s go and see if Nanny will play tea parties with you for ten minutes while I have a shower. Then, I tell you what, I’ll give you and Nanny a lift to playgroup in my car, how about that?’

‘Yeah!’ she shouted, and Patrick sagged with relief that she seemed to have accepted the compromise. He carried her downstairs into the living room, not failing to miss the very slight exasperated eye roll from his dad at the imminent interruption to his peace.

‘Play with Gramps for a moment, he really wants to play tea parties,’ Patrick said sweetly, depositing Bonnie in Jim’s lap where she immediately made a grab for his iPhone, which Patrick knew always annoyed Jim. Jim deftly extricated the phone and wrapped his arms around Bonnie in a big bear hug to distract her. Patrick left them like that, hoping that Jim wouldn’t immediately go and find Mairead and dump Bonnie back on her so he could get back to his online Scrabble. It was a familiar, unacknowledged, gripe. As Patrick stripped off and climbed under the pathetic dribbly shower – that was another thing he missed, the power shower he’d installed himself in his and Gill’s house – he tried to quash the gripe. Jim and Mairead had both agreed to take him and Bonnie in, and Jim had always been lazy. It would be naïve to assume that he would suddenly become a child-minding housework-blitzing dynamo once he retired. It was so good of them to help out when the only alternative would have been extreme stress for Pat himself, and a string of au-pairs and nannies.