Text instead: Just checking in. All OK? Dad. Sam always poked fun at him for signing his messages. But he couldn’t help doing it. In fact, he didn’t want to stop, just like he didn’t want to stop doing lots of things: reading printed newspapers, buying stuff in shops, writing letters… The joys of browsing in a record store? Jeff Bezos deserved a good kicking for putting paid to that little pleasure in life.

He was waiting for technical assistance to become available. Missing persons don’t get priority unless they’re high risk. Craig Shaw wasn’t in that category, not yet. Joe had the risk assessment form in front of him. But until he could get some straight answers from the victim’s mother, there was no point in making any kind of assessment.

Remember, if in doubt, think the worst until the contrary is proved.

He was ready to think the absolute worst. He had the rest of the paperwork in front of him too, including a National Missing Persons Database form and a SIRENE European Missing Persons form. But none of this could be done until Jane Shaw decided to sober up. Meanwhile, he’d have to wait his turn for technical assistance, and he was hard pushed to imagine who wouldn’t get ahead of him in the queue.

Jane Shaw’s phone was on the desk, along with a number of print-outs that he’d assembled over the last hour or so. He picked up the phone and found the image gallery. Mother-and-son shots, nothing out of the ordinary. She was smiling in all of them. Her eyes were bright and clear. It made such a difference. Were they happy moments, or just posed? The happiness seemed natural. He saw the humanity in her face, the softness of her soul. It made him ache with sadness.

That’s why he was still a DS at forty-four, working the cases no one else wanted. It wasn’t that everything had gone wrong in Lyon, the failed leap to greater things, then the humiliation of coming back. And it wasn’t because he was too soft for this job. He’d seen his share of horrors, more than a decade in plain clothes, the full gamut of criminal squalor.

No, this was different. Things were out of kilter. He felt it every morning when he woke up. There was a kind of reticence in him. His former boldness was ebbing away, his instincts for a case, the sense that things would always get resolved. And the optimism. He used to have that in bucketloads. Not now.