The nation breathed a collective sigh of both relief and shock when Anna Roberts – who had been abducted as a four-year-old – was found in 2013, more than a decade after her disappearance, suffering from amnesia after having been hit by a car, but otherwise in good health. She had run off from a farmhouse in rural Scotland where she had been held for several years – the place she had come to see as her home.

‘I didn’t “escape”,’ Anna, now eighteen and living under a carefully guarded assumed name, corrects me when I ask about her memories of this night. ‘It wasn’t like that. It took a while for my memory to come back, and it did so only in dribs and drabs, but that house was my home, where I lived with my dad. It wasn’t a prison. Not at all.’

Wearing a short skirt and over-sized jumper and fiddling with her long, peroxide-white hair, she sighs. ‘Dad and I had had a row that night. It took a while after I was … found, but eventually, with the help of hypnosis, I started to gradually remember what had happened that night. But all teenagers argue with their parents at some point, don’t they? I wasn’t trying to escape – I was just angry. I’d have gone back. Probably that same night, as I had nowhere else to go. If he hadn’t … if I hadn’t …’ She pauses and bites her lip, exposing almost-invisible braces. ‘Well. Everyone knows what happened then.’

I ask if she remembers what the row was about. She pauses and looks thoughtful before replying. ‘Yeah. I do. Just normal teenage stuff, the kind of thing everyone argues with their parents about. It’s not important what it was, and I don’t want to talk about that now.’

Following the death of her abductor and the discovery of who she really was, Anna was returned to her family in Catford. That can’t have been easy after an eleven-year absence, I suggest.

‘It was far from easy,’ she tells me. ‘I was just … thrown back into this family and, yeah, they were kind and pleased to have me back, especially, uh, Karen, my mother, I suppose she is, but at the same time, they were strangers, you know?’

She picks at a thread on her skirt. ‘It was … hard. It still is hard. I get that Dad abducting me was a bad thing to do, and the therapists they make me visit can barely shut up about it, but … as far as I’m concerned, he was my dad, the man who brought me up. He was the only family I’d ever known. He took good care of me. He did everything for me. He was nothing but kind to me and when he died, and when I left, I missed him terribly.’ She pauses. ‘I still do. Every single day.’