Finally, as the album neared the end of what would have been side one when he had originally bought it on cassette, when he was at school, he turned to another page and wrote FRANKIE AND FAMILY.

The SOCOs had turned up nothing useful at the house. No prints, no DNA, nothing at all. The field team had been going from door to door all day and had come up with one potentially useful fact. An elderly man who lived opposite, and who had opened the door to let his cat in just as the ten o’clock news was finishing – ‘I bloody hate the amusing story they always have on at the end,’ he had grumbled – had seen ‘a lad cycling away on a pushbike’. He hadn’t seen this lad coming out of the Philipses’ house but there was a strong chance that this was where he’d been.

Patrick wrote down Larry’s name on the paper. Patrick didn’t think for a second that this teenage boy was responsible for abducting his girlfriend’s half-sister, but he wanted to talk to him. If Larry had been in the house when Frankie had been taken, or just before, he was an important witness. He made a note to ask Carmella to go and find him. She had a way with teenage lads.

There was also Sean Philips. In the madness of the day, he hadn’t personally interviewed Frankie’s dad yet, although Carmella had taken a brief statement from him. That was another job for tomorrow.

Finally, he wrote down ‘Frankie’s picture’. The child’s drawing, stored now as evidence, made Patrick’s skin feel like hundreds of tiny baby spiders were crawling across it. When had Frankie seen someone peering through her window, if that was what the drawing signified? And why hadn’t she alerted her sister if she’d seen a face at the window? Surely, that’s what any small child would do? He double-underlined the question just as his phone vibrated on his desk. He pulled his headphones down around his neck and said, ‘Yes?’

Daniel Hamlet was the most serious person Patrick had ever met. He was a black man in his mid-forties and, while on TV forensic pathologists tended to employ gallows humour to make what they did more bearable – just as Patrick and many of his cop colleagues did – Hamlet was like his Danish namesake in that he was intense and not known for his sense of humour. He didn’t even smile when faced with the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ quote for the 10,000th time in his life. But then, thought Patrick, who could blame him?