Day after, the police were in their living room. Looking ginormous. A man and a woman, black and white checks round their hats like tiny versions of a motor-racing flag. The woman wrote tiny words with a tiny pencil onto a tiny notepad and kept giving Matty soft looks. Mamma had put make-up on, wore her shiny black heels even though she was indoors. The policeman spread his thighs wide, taking deep sniffs, looking around. You could see his willie poking there, just a bit. When he left, the point of his hat almost touched his nose.

Just the woman the second time. Mamma’s voice, raised. Her Italian accent always got stronger when she was upset. Matty sat out in the hall, drinking orange squash through a straw, kicking the skirting board, listening. Something about a pond. ‘I would have known,’ Mamma had said. ‘Fine. You have to search. It’s your job!’

The policewoman asked Matty questions this time too, shifting her skirt down over her knees. Her tights were thick and deep beige, like her legs had gone on holiday. Lipstick the colour of pink wafers. Mamma had gone to make her a cup of tea. Thanks, Rosa, the policewoman had said, as if they were friends.

‘Your dad liked swimming, didn’t he?’

Did he? ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, we think he might have gone swimming in the Men’s Pond. Someone at his work said as much. You know the one, on the Heath? Did you ever go there with him?’

Head-shake.

‘Was he upset about anything? Maybe he and your mum …’ her voice quietened. ‘Did they argue much?’

Shrug. Everyone’s parents did. Every kid crept out of bed to sit at the top of the stairs, making two dents in their forehead from the banister rails, listening to them shouting, collecting their swearwords like Panini football stickers. Didn’t they?

Just gone, clean gone. He’d been kidnapped by gangsters, whipped off the street, tugged into a car with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform over his nose. The ransom note to them had got lost in the post. Or he was a spy. Top-secret operations, classified. The Soviets had got him because he knew confidential information about cruise missiles, and a sniper had taken him out as he’d been walking to work, which wasn’t foreman at Anlow Shopfitters – that had all been just a disguise. He’d been so good at his real job that even his family were none the wiser. All this time, and neither of them had ever known.