Mike shook his head. “I can’t imagine there’d be anything like that,” he said. “According to everyone who knew him, he was quiet, respectable, hardworking. I found him hard to talk to. He only showed any animation when he was discussing boats. He wanted to go back to Cornwall. That was his plan all along.”

“When you supervised him on parole, did you meet any of his friends?” Molly asked.

“No,” the man said. “ We didn’t get close at all. He saw the parole commitment as a formality. He reported to the office when I asked him, but he gave nothing of himself away.”

“He never mentioned Greg Franks to you?”

“No,” Mike said. “I don’t remember that name.” He stood up awkwardly. Molly supposed he had other clients to see. “ Work,” he said. “If you see Louis Rosco, send him my best wishes. I regret sometimes that I never persuaded him to tell me what happened at the boat yard. I was inexperienced; I feel that I’ve let him down.” He shook her hand, and she could imagine his having made the same gesture of sad formality when he sent Rosco home to Cornwall.

Molly began to make her way out of the building to the street. She walked down the long corridor towards reception and noticed that the senior probation officer’s door was open. She hesitated at the door, thinking that she should thank Joanna, say goodbye. But the woman was writing a report with intense concentration and seemed not to notice that Molly was there.

It was almost lunchtime, and when she went outside, the shopping centre was busier. The chip shop was open, and a straggle of people stretched onto the pavement. Near the launderette there was a group of mothers with bin bags of washing perched on prams and pushchairs. They reminded each other optimistically that the kids would be back at school in a couple of days, and then they could have some time to themselves again.

“But at least it’s been fine,” they said, looking at the sky, where the wispy trails of cloud were becoming more substantial. “At least they haven’t been in under our feet for six weeks.” They were cheerful. Now that the holidays were almost over, they could laugh at the ordeal.

They took no notice of Molly standing, bemused, in the centre of the arcade. She was a scruffy little lady who might have come from the old people’s sheltered housing on the edge of the estate. When she took out an A to Z and studied the road map, the women thought she could be a social worker or someone from Educational Welfare checking that the regular truants were prepared for school.

Molly looked up the Pyms’ address in the index and then found the map. They lived in an area of the city which she would have to pass on her way back to the hospital.