‘Downstairs,’ I managed, unable to tell him straight the awful thing I’d done. With the officer’s voice still ringing in my ears, I’d picked up the roses – the crystal vase of glowing red flowers, my husband’s nine-year anniversary present to me – lifting them to sit on the living-room mantelpiece. Perhaps I’d been in shock, still hardly thinking straight, but the one idea in my head was to place them there as a glowing symbol to welcome her home because this was everything I had ever wanted, everything I had dreamed of and hoped for, ever since she was eight, ever since she went missing, through seven long and painful years. Now my heart was bursting and all I wanted was a beautiful sight for her, all I’d wanted was for it to be perfect. Instead the vase had snagged on the lip, and one moment I’d had the precious flowers in my hands and the next there’d been a crash, an explosion of glass and rose stems strewn all over the hearth.

Now the pieces were in the bin and the bruised roses in the sink, but all that mattered was that Robert was coming forward to hug me, kneeling down on the floor and taking me in his arms, an outpouring of happiness and relief that she was found.

The twins pushed in beside us, all anxious, curious blue eyes. ‘But what are you doing?’ Laurie said. Gently Robert released me. Now he could take in the papers scattered at my knees. The phone call had come when I was alone, so out of the blue, so completely unexpected, a voice I didn’t recognize, a local officer I didn’t know telling me this information that was so impossible, unbelievable, that I’d had to ask him again and again to repeat it, with that single, impossible fact.

Dead? She isn’t dead?

No, Mrs White. No…

Kneeling in her room I must have looked a mess – flushed and unravelled, my hands grimy with dust from the papers – but I was so sure of what I wanted. I scraped my hair behind my ears. We hadn’t been in this room for months but all the evidence was in here, a paper trail leading all the way back. ‘Can you help me?’ I said. ‘I can’t have her room looking like this. Please, Robert, not this way.’ I wanted a home, a sanctuary, not a display of everything that had gone wrong. I couldn’t let it be like that now.