I scrub my hands over my face, buying a few seconds to calm myself before I begin to speak. I haven’t talked about what happened before, not since I left Scotland, and I’ve spent even more time lately trying to block it from my thoughts entirely, but I suppose there had to come a point when I had to be honest. But I wish it wasn’t under these circumstances.

‘It was the summer of 2012. I had been in Scotland for a few weeks after finishing my training, staying with a boyfriend who lived there. To be honest, things didn’t work out with him pretty quickly, but by then I’d already got the job with the Mackenzies. I was faced with a decision – either move back home to try and find a job in Brighton or try and make a go of things in Killin on my own. The Mackenzies offered to let me live in once they heard I’d broken up with my boyfriend, so I jumped at the chance to stay with them and carry on looking after Archie.’

I break for a moment, taking a sip of the lukewarm water. Just thinking about Archie, his huge dark eyes, those plump little baby thighs, brings stinging hot tears to my eyes.

‘So, what went wrong?’ DC Bishop asks. ‘Presumably something happened there that meant you wanted to change your name, become someone else?’

‘They were quite a prominent, well-known family in Killin, the Mackenzies. He did something in local politics, she was . . . I don’t know; she’d done some modelling before they were married, she was Greek, and they’d met while he was out there on holiday. They had no problems with being out every night, leaving me to look after the baby. I didn’t get a day off, rarely anyway. I was exhausted a lot of the time.’ And I was – any new mother will tell you how exhausting it is to take care of a child all day and all night. ‘I’m not making excuses about what happened, you know?’

DC Bishop nods, and I wonder if she has children, if there is someone at home, employed by her, putting her children to bed while she is searching for another lost child.