‘You need to be here for Poppy, keep things steady for her,’ Eric replies quietly. ‘I’ll phone as soon as I find out anything.’

He’s right, she knows that. She must stay here. Poppy will need to know her mother’s at home, not where she’d rather be, beating on doors in the police station, begging for information. She watches Eric hurry after Igor as he is led away by the policemen, stumbling in his loose slippers. She might have known. It’s what people always say, that the criminal is someone close to you, someone who has been there from the start, inside your home or nearby. She attempts to enter the bungalow, but the Scottish policewoman steps in front of her, shuts the door and stands with her back to it. ‘I regret you are not permitted to enter.’

‘What’s he done with my daughter?’

‘A statement will be released later. I’m sorry not to be able to tell you more at the present time.’ Her face is sympathetic but she doesn’t move, not even an inch. Eve steps back, panting. She must use her wits. Grace will help, she’ll know what to do. Eve hurries down the path, passing the smaller policewoman stationed at the gate. Back in the kitchen, her handbag is lying on the table, the contents spilling out, her purse, hairbrush, car keys. Three happy children smile up from the photograph in her wallet. She stares at all the objects on the table as if unearthed from the rubble of a dig, relics of a vanished life.

Igor’s words return to her in the silence ‘… so that’s why I couldn’t find him under the bonnet’: his idea of a joke on a warm day back in the spring, when life was full and she was happy. She grabs the keys and runs to the cars, releases the bonnets in turn, heaves them up. Only the engine, water tank and greasy wires, dark tubes that twist like guts. She slams both bonnets shut. On the way back to the house she bends to vomit in the flower bed. She gropes her way upstairs.