To begin with Julia couldn’t see anything apart from a dense row of trees which virtually concealed the playground behind them. If there was a streetlamp here it was either faulty or far away; at any rate there wasn’t even enough light to make out what the poster was advertising on the huge billboard by the side of the road. Likewise, the woman who suddenly emerged from the dim twilight, wiggling her hips as she approached the car, was little more than a shadow at first. Even when she bent down to the passenger window, thereby entering the light of the camera, Julia couldn’t recognise the face because it was pixelated. In a pretend wicked voice, the woman whispered into the camera, ‘You can do anything you like with me, sweetheart, but filming costs extra.’

‘Christ Almighty!’ Julia panted, inching herself away from the dressing table. She turned around, but Lisa had closed the connecting door. She was alone in the cabin and, besides, her daughter had said she wanted to take a look around the ship.

Is that…?

The woman in the video was the same height, had the same black hair and the same slim build. And worst of all: she had her voice.

‘Is that…?’ Julia gasped, but couldn’t utter her daughter’s name.

No, it can’t be. It’s impossible.

The girl, who’d now taken a step backwards and turned around to show off some flesh, was wearing clothes that could easily be in Lisa’s wardrobe: a petticoat dress, fishnet tights and spotted peep toes. It was the sort of thing she’d worn before switching from her rockabilly phase to her Goth one without any transition.

But the voices weren’t that similar, Julia tried to convince herself.

‘Please tell me that’s not my daughter,’ she begged Tom as the film cut to a radically different camera angle.

‘No…’ Julia groaned softly when she saw the steering wheel. The dark dashboard. And the back of the girl’s head, moving back and forth rhythmically, accompanied by squelching noises, while the faceless man in whose lap her head was buried moaned with pleasure.

‘Is that Lisa?’ Julia rasped.

She heard Tom exhale. ‘Hard to tell. Possibly.’

‘Possibly is not definitely. It could be someone else, couldn’t it? A fake?’

‘Yes, maybe. I mean, you don’t see any faces.’

‘My God,’ Julia sighed. She closed her eyes, unwilling to face up to the significance of what she’d just seen.

‘Okay… Okay…’ It took her three attempts to complete her sentence. ‘That’s not her!’

It mustn’t be her.

‘I’m not really sure either,’ Tom agreed. ‘But I’m afraid that what we think is irrelevant.’

He asked her to open up the comments column below the video. Julia felt ill. The screen was flooded with vile contributions from users hiding behind pseudonyms, while her daughter was referred to by her full name: