In their early days, she showed him this. She told him how it was unhealthy to bottle up memories and pretend that painful things didn’t exist. He needed to let his emotions out into the air, otherwise they would rot inside him, making him sick. She asked him to mirror her, tap his own head, before moving down his face to his ribcage. The lungs hold grief. It was some kind of mad ritual. He felt like an ape, scratching itself under the armpits, and he remembers doing an impression: Is this The Jungle Book now, love? He rugby-tackled her on to the bed and she pushed him back, saying that if he couldn’t take things seriously, she would stop showing him.

When she found there were not enough traumatized tourists to keep her in the black, she bought a therapy bed and increased the massages. Niall tried to stop her, saying he could support them. He didn’t want her touching other men. She said she wanted to help people. She would rather massage an attractive young man, she said, but she had yet to meet one. She was still spending her time helping old ladies with their back problems.

‘And,’ says Morrison, whose name is starting to stick, ‘do you remember anything more about the day she went missing?’

He can’t remember the day. The white day. Absolute white. The day he’d tried his best to describe to the police once before. The day that felt as if there was no colour and the significance of things became untethered in fog. He’d felt as though he was floating somewhere frozen and blanched, while she evaporated. There was nothing truly surrounding him. This world showed its true self: not a place for him after all and not a place of any kindness. Any kindness in the sort of quantity that could ever match her absence: the horror and the cruelty of it. If it wasn’t for Lauren, he would be dead by now.

Phone calls on that day, the day she disappeared, and the days following, lit up like lightning against cloud. The sound of a phone sent electric currents up his white spine. Always the doorbell, never the key in the lock. And she never came home and she never came home. White days, like being high in the mountains without oxygen, without breath, a tightness in the lungs and baby Lauren in her cot.

Angela Walker was so distant in the days after the disappearance. Kirsty and Craig rallied round to take care of the baby. Angela never spoke to Niall about Christine’s disappearance and yet he overheard her once when she was queuing in front of him at the bakery, gossiping with another woman.

‘It’s been simply awful,’ she said to the lady, as if Niall’s grief somehow belonged to her. ‘She was my best friend.’