“If there’s anything else, we need to know,” Lawrence encouraged her. “If you were at the incident, you saw how that turned out. There are some extremely bad people out there, and we need to bring them in before this happens again.”

“I thought I met her. On the street. Later.” Now Pryor wasn’t meeting anyone’s gaze. “I thought it was her, just…out of nowhere, just…back. That’s what I remembered, next morning, after spending half the night getting home. Then she’d simply gone away again. Gone where I couldn’t follow.”

Julian’s lips twitched in irritation. “What do you mean?”

“I remember things that couldn’t have happened,” Pryor said dully. “I did before, when Mal went. And now I’ve done it again. I remember Mal going away, into…into the Away. And that can’t have happened, right? And I remember her calling, except she can’t have called. You want a statement, officers? I solemnly swear I do not know what the fuck is happening or what is true. Or whether I’m just a brain in the jar and you’re all made up out of my head. Is that good enough? Type it up and I’ll sign it.” Now she was looking up again, full of an anger to which he and Lawrence were only accidental accessories.

Julian was about to push her nonetheless, because anger could be a useful skeleton key to all sorts of doors, but Lawrence stood abruptly. “Thank you, Miss Pryor,” she said. “We’d like you to come down to your local station very shortly, so we can talk this through in more detail. Would that be all right?” Julian was trying to catch her gaze without showing any disunity to Pryor, but Lawrence soldiered on. “We’ll give you a call in the next day or so, to agree a time. If you have any contact from Mallor—Mal in the meantime, then you must get in touch immediately, you understand.” She fed a card into Pryor’s numb fingers. “I can’t stress how important that is. Whoever your friend is involved with, they are extremely dangerous, and it’s important she’s separated from them as quickly as possible.”

Back at the car, Julian finally exploded. “What was that, precisely?”

“That was me being wary about interviewing someone who might have mental health problems without proper procedures and support personnel in place,” Lawrence said. “Look, here. That stuff she was coming out with, did you see the interview she gave in Cornwall?”

“She practically repeated it for us verbatim.”

“Not that one. Look.” She passed her phone to him. “There was another disappearance on the moor around the same time. Turns out she got interviewed about it.”