Saskia opens the app now and taps on Beth’s symbol. Then she watches the map shift west across London, in the direction of Heathrow. But no, it moves farther out of the city. When it stops, Beth seems to be in a residential area, a mesh of streets with a couple of cafés and a mosque. Saskia squints a little to read the street name (because the font is small, not because she needs reading glasses) but it’s not familiar. She slides her fingers towards each other across the phone screen to zoom out, looking for a clue as to Beth’s whereabouts. Royal Berkshire Hospital; Reading College; Reading train station.

Why is Beth in Reading?

Saskia drops her elbows onto the next step up and stares at the ceiling. Of course there could be dozens of perfectly innocent (boring) reasons: visiting an old university friend, or one of their many peers who moved out of London before the school years started. But if that’s the reason, why the secrecy? And it doesn’t explain why Beth snapped at Saskia for overhearing her phone conversation the other day.

Reading is farther away than Heathrow, a longer journey back to London, but even so, Saskia feels less inclined to offer to help her so-called friend now. Partly because her instincts are screaming that Beth won’t be pleased about being tracked to Reading, and partly because why the fuck should she always be there for Beth, when Beth clearly doesn’t extend the same courtesy to her? But mostly because her journalistic antennae have been stimulated and are now buzzing with curiosity.

Saskia pushes off the stairs and practically skips into her kitchen. Her laptop is on the island unit, and she slides onto the nearest stool and clicks on the mousepad (while she rarely admits it, she does prefer the bigger screen). She opens Google Maps, types in the street name from her phone, and then drags and drops the little yellow man (of course it’s a man) to open up the street view. Interesting, she thinks. Unlikely to be a university friend, or a London escapee. The area is grey and scruffy, not helped by the heavy clouds overhead, as though Google chose weather that was on-brand with the landscape. The houses are hard to distinguish, just one long rendered building, probably painted white originally. The only demarcation is a line of PVC front doors, and they pop up with surprising frequency. Saskia thought London terraces were narrow, but these are on a different scale. A quick search on StreetCheck backs up the image of a deprived area, with high unemployment, drugs and antisocial behaviour.