“Have you had a good look for other people she’s been connecting with or tagging or whatever they call it? She might be with a mate we don’t know.”

Steph shook her head. “I can’t see her profiles anymore, can I? Another condition of the infamous Freya’s Privacy and Independence Bill. That’s why I feel bad snooping around. Jess and a few others checked for me. They said she hadn’t been online tonight.”

“We’ll give them another ring.”

“Are we making a fuss over nothing?”

Paul checked his watch. It was almost nine p.m. “Well, if she’s going to give us radio silence, we’re entitled to some light snooping.”

He fought to keep his voice steady, to balance out the fear in Steph’s posture, her hands clutching the back of his shirt.

—

Paul phoned round Freya’s mates for a second time, adding a few more as Steph thought of them, disguising his worry beneath a daft-dad performance that would have made his daughter cringe. He kicked off a phone tree of her volleyball and running-club friends, and asked Jess to read out every one of Freya’s social media posts from the last month. Most were about loving driving, hating the stats part of her business coursework (“but, in a weird way, enjoying hating it”), and “destroying” volleyball rivals. Some of the posts were funny and eloquent, though Freya would probably give him her best whatever look if he complimented her on them. She was surprisingly self-conscious about everything but her sporting abilities, her intelligence most of all.

Once they’d run out of ideas, Paul looked at Steph. It was a quarter to eleven. The heat had gone off and the flat was glacial, though they were only just noticing, rubbing their goose-pimpled arms. Paul didn’t have to ask the question out loud. Steph nodded grimly and he reached again for his phone.

The on-duty PCs who arrived were young, the man still in training, Paul guessed. He said all the standard things—that these situations usually resolved themselves, and she wasn’t officially missing yet—but he had an awkward manner, as if he was still learning his lines. The woman sat looking around their home, appraising their life. Freya’s framed image decorated every surface, a gallery of different ages and haircuts: disappearing puppy fat and emerging cheekbones, freckles that came and went with the sun. She smiled from the blue-gray walls, too, closed mouth when she’d had her fixed braces on, flashing her liberated teeth once she’d had them removed.