She gestured around her. ‘This. I look after this bloody lot. Danny is in the studio most of the time, or DJ-ing. Leaves me looking after his spawn.’ That was his name! Danny Hollister. ‘But I’ve just had an offer to go on the next series of I’m a Celeb and between you and me I might just do it. See how he copes for two weeks without me. Ha!’

Patrick sipped his coffee. ‘Which of the children thinks they saw Liam McConnell?’

Liza frowned, the mood in the room changing instantly. ‘That’s Bowie. He’s up in his room. Let me get him.’

He expected her to go up the stairs but instead she shouted, ‘Bowie! Can you come down here?’

‘I’ve been over it with him,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be sure he wasn’t making it up, or had dreamt it. But I swear he’s not.’

‘I’d like to hear it in his own words,’ Patrick said. ‘But can you tell me why it’s taken so long? Did he only just remember?’

‘Oh, we were away. We’d stopped off at the supermarket on our way to the airport. We have a villa in the south of France and we were taking the kids there for the week. We’re heading back over there in a fortnight.’ She gestured out of the front window at the people carrier parked on the driveway. ‘We were in that thing – the tank, we call it. I went into the shop leaving Danny with the kids. I’m sure it was bedlam as always, the kids fighting and complaining. Danny would have been trying to get them to stop squabbling. But Bowie is quieter than the others. He usually sits still and reads books or looks out the window, daydreaming. We reckon he’s going to be a writer when he grows up.’

A skinny boy of seven came into the room. He was the spitting image of his mum, with long blond hair and big blue eyes. He looked nervous.

‘Babe, this is Detective Lennon. Lennon, meet Bowie.’ She paused, then started to giggle. Patrick laughed too – he couldn’t help it – but the boy didn’t crack a smile. His pale face remained serious, anxious, and Patrick remembered what he’d been like as a child. Just like this: scared of strangers, always ‘away in the clouds’, as his mum put it, preferring to sit with a book when his friends were out playing football.

Liza put her arm around her son’s shoulders and led him over to the sofa. He stared at Patrick, chewing his fingernails. Patrick sat down on a floor cushion to ensure the boy’s eye level was above his, to make him feel less uneasy.