I started by asking her about the movements of her parents in the weeks and months before they disappeared, and she replied in a soft South Yorkshire accent, her blonde hair scraped into a bun, her face carrying the lines and shadows of a mother whose six-week-old baby was waking up on the hour, every hour, all night. Despite her obvious exhaustion, her responses were lucid, often very detailed and precise, perhaps reflecting the nature of her work as a forensic accountant at KPMG, her face a clear echo of her mum’s: I recalled the photo I’d seen of John and Freda Davey on the cruise ship, him in a rugby league shirt, her underweight and pale, and it had been the colour of Freda’s eyes that had caught my attention. Rina’s were the same vivid blue.

‘So your parents seemed all right in those last few weeks?’ I asked her.

She picked up a glass of water, sipping from it, thinking. ‘They seemed fine. I honestly can’t think of anything we talked about that raised any alarm bells with me.’

‘How often did you speak to them?’

‘Mum, I would normally speak to three or four times a week on the phone, and then we’d text most days. Dad, I would text less often – maybe once or twice a week.’

‘I read that your mum had cancer.’

A flash of distress.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

She shrugged. ‘It is what it is, I guess.’

‘This was the end of 2013?’

‘That’s right, yeah.’

‘And it came back a couple of years later, before she disappeared?’

‘She went to see her GP in August, I think, and she was back at the hospital in September. She said to me that the doctors reckoned it was early and it was treatable, and so she was due to start chemo in October, but decided to delay for a few months.’

‘Any idea why?’

‘She told one of the nurses she wanted to go on holiday first.’

That had been in the file too.

‘But she didn’t tell you that?’ I asked.