Then there’d been a knock at her door at noon one Tuesday. Who the hell worried about answering the door between elevenses and lunch? Nothing bad happened at that time of day, not on a Tuesday in your own home. It wasn’t unusual for one of the other tenants simply to buzz people in without asking for so much as a name. The pizza delivery guy regularly just pressed any old button and worried about checking the flat number when he was indoors, out of the rain.

Fenny had answered the door hoping it hadn’t been the Jehovah’s back to talk her ear off again. She always felt guilty when she told them to get lost but the result of her not doing so was sometimes a thirty-minute polite conversation about how nicely printed their brochures were as she figured out an excuse to shut the door.

Instead, the man at her door was looking sombre and professional.

‘Mrs Hawksmith,’ he said, holding up a badge dangling from a brightly coloured lanyard. ‘I’m from a family reintroduction charity. We have information about your daughter, Alice. Could we talk, if it’s not a bad time?’

She hadn’t given it a second thought. Thirty seconds later, she was brushing crumbs off her couch so he had somewhere to sit without ruining his smart trousers. Her head had been reeling. News of her daughter, after so long … So she wasn’t dead. If she’d been dead, it would have been the polis at her door.

Standing in the middle of her tiny sitting room, Fenny had shifted from foot to foot, wanting to hear the news, dreading what it might be, clinging on to hope she’d long since forgotten existed.

‘Is there anyone here who might support you or are you alone today?’ the man had asked.

‘No, it’s just me …’

Fenny realised in her excitement that she hadn’t even asked the man’s name. Now she wasn’t sure how to backtrack, not that she wanted to waste any time. There was news. It was suddenly worth every birthday and Christmas, every Mother’s Day, every morning when her daughter’s bed hadn’t been slept in. Finally, there was the prospect of something other than the void of loss.

‘Just to clarify, you aren’t cohabiting or flat-sharing at the present time. It’s important to establish that any information we share with you will remain confidential, you see.’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ Fenny had gushed. ‘It’s just me here. If you have some news, I promise not to talk to anyone else about it.’