‘Fenella, we need to have a conversation and I need you to give me the right answers,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’ll need to concentrate. I’m going to help you with that, okay? I’m going to make it all much easier for you.’

‘I want to see my daughter,’ Fenny said, looking at the bulge in the man’s trouser pocket.

It certainly wasn’t mobile phone-shaped and the broad curves suggested something other than a set of keys.

‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘How much time do you spend actually thinking about her? Once a day? Does she even get that much from you? Isn’t it more realistic that you think about her maybe once a week?’

Fenny stood up, closer to him than she was comfortable with, lifting her face several inches to look at him directly.

‘There’s not an hour of the day that goes by when I don’t think of my girl,’ she said, tears filling her eyes and rage tensing every muscle.

‘Do you?’ he smiled. ‘Does a mother who actually loves her missing child really attempt suicide? I think not. I believe that you’d wait for her as long as it took, because if there was the most minuscule chance that your daughter might come home, or get arrested, might end up in a hospital and ask for you, you ought to be there for her. Why would you attempt to deprive that poor girl of her only surviving parent? That’s just not right.’

He reached out and took hold of Fenny’s left hand with his right. Something about his touch felt off, too cool, fake. She raised her hand in his grasp to get a better look.

Gloves. Whoever this man was, for some reason he was wearing clear plastic gloves.

As she opened her mouth to put the question she was thinking into words, she felt a thump that was punctuated by a metallic snap over her left wrist. The dangling handcuff was closed but not overly tight. Ridiculously, she wondered if he was police, after all – not there to notify her of her daughter’s death but to arrest her for some parenting offence she hadn’t even known she’d committed. The wrongness took a few seconds to sink in.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re up to? You’ve got to get out of my place right now. Do you hear me?’

The man laughed.

Fenny tugged at the handcuff. She didn’t even want him to get the cuff off. That would mean him touching her again and she really didn’t want that. Not with those creepy gloves on.

‘You want me to leave already? But you haven’t heard what I came to tell you about Alice yet,’ he said.