‘It certainly is, my sweet,’ Sean agreed, in his comedy Del-Boy voice. ‘Mange tout, mange tout.’

She laughed, and studied him affectionately. ‘You’ve been saying that for years.’

‘Ah but it never gets old, does it? Unlike me.’ He rubbed ruefully at his bald head, now kept shaven to draw attention away from the large hairless spot at the crown. The stubble made a small scratchy sound under his fingers. Sean had great cheekbones, but a slightly unfortunate cone-shaped skull. He didn’t look bad with a shaved head, but Helen had to admit he’d looked better with hair.

‘You’re still gorgeous,’ she said, smiling at his spikily fringed dark green eyes.

‘You’re not so bad yourself, doll-face.’ He winked at her and they clinked glasses, but Helen couldn’t help wishing that he would occasionally return a compliment with something a little more romantic than a silly accent.

Her phone buzzed, and she immediately picked it up from the table, where she’d kept it throughout the meal. But it was only an electronic notification of someone’s move in Words With Friends, and she sighed with relief. For once, she had actually remembered to charge her phone before going out, something she was hopeless at. Sean was always nagging her about it.

‘Perhaps I should call to see how it’s going,’ she said, phone still in hand. Sean reached across the table and gently took it from her. ‘Relax, Hel. If there was a problem Alice would’ve called. You know she would. She might be a lazy madam but you know she adores Frankie. Besides, there’s no way she’d deal with a pile of vomit or too much screaming on her own if she knew we were only ten minutes away, so we can be certain that nothing’s amiss. Why are you so jumpy all of a sudden? You haven’t been this paranoid since she was a baby!’

Helen felt annoyed with him again. ‘You know why. Liam McConnell and Izzy Hartley, that’s why.’

Liam and Izzy were the names of the two stolen children. Helen’s friend Elena took her child to the same nursery Liam had been enrolled at, and knew his mother. The poor woman was a total wreck apparently, dragging herself around hollow-eyed with Prozac, on permanent tenterhooks for the smallest morsel of news of her son, news that so far – almost a week in – hadn’t materialized. Both children had vanished seemingly into thin air, within two days of one another.

Sean bristled slightly at the implied criticism, as he always did when it came to his daughter. ‘Alice would never let that happen.’