He had toyed with the idea of calling ahead to save a wasted trip, but that thorn was still digging in him. Just in case Pryor was up to her neck in it, he didn’t want to find that a clumsy overture had led to her fleeing the country.

At Lawrence’s knock they heard someone moving inside. A door two flats down opened and an old man stuck his head out balefully, wispy hair flaring like a halo in the light from the window at the corridor’s end. Julian smiled politely, and then Pryor opened the door. She was smaller than he’d expected, a stocky woman just younger than Lawrence herself, wearing jeans and a T-shirt showing a tentacled monster and a complex word full of consonants ending in -con 2017.

“Miss Pryor? Hi, I’m Detective Sergeant Lawrence.” She launched into the usual spiel: friendly introductions, then showing a badge with a calm and reassuring manner. “Mind if we come in to ask you a few questions?”

Pryor nodded without actually clearing the doorway. Her eyes slid over to Julian, and he was sure, in that instant, that she knew him too. Then she gave a strained smile and backed into the flat to let them enter, and he wasn’t sure after all.

He’d thought Lawrence would take the lead, but she brought out her phone and informed Pryor she’d be recording, then sent a challenging look his way. Pryor’s flat was a bedsit: bedroom/living room, a tiny corner for a kitchen and then an en suite. The limited space was monopolized by bookshelves, double-stacked with books and then half obscured by piles of more literature and periodicals. It was unpleasantly claustrophobic. Nobody else seemed to mind.

“Miss Pryor—May I call you Lisa?”

“Lee. People call me Lee,” she said. She was tense and twitchy, but then, remarkably few people welcomed the intrusion of the authorities. It didn’t necessarily mean she was mixed up in this Mallory business, but still…

“My name’s Julian.” He wasn’t as good at reassuring as Lawrence. “We’re here to talk to you about some ancient history, I’m afraid. An old friend of yours, Elsinore Mallory.”

Pryor nodded, a single staccato movement, and sat down on the bed. No surprise, he saw. Here to talk about someone four years vanished, and Pryor didn’t think that at all odd.

“Would you care to tell us again about when you last saw her?” DS Lawrence had taken the room’s single chair, turning it round so that the desk and its monitor were at her back. Over her shoulder, Daleks trundled endlessly from the left of the screensaver to the right. “I know you went through this already, but if you could…?”

They listened as Pryor recited all that had happened on the moor. She stuttered a bit, but seemed weary and still hurt by it, rather than guilty.