She got up and handed the pictures to Peter. He took them with shaky hands and his brow furrowed as he stared at the pictures. Linda whimpered. Peter seemed frozen.

‘Mr and Mrs Agnew, is that your daughter?’

‘No,’ Linda said, her bloodshot eyes looking up from the pictures to Dani. ‘No. It’s not. I’ve never seen her before.’

‘You’re positive? If there’s any doubt, we can arrange for you to view the body, so you can be doubly sure. We’d have to do that anyway in order to complete a formal identification.’

‘No,’ Peter said. ‘We’re absolutely sure. That poor woman is not Grace. I’ve never seen her before.’

He put the pictures down onto the coffee table and took his sobbing wife in his arms.

Twenty minutes later the crying had stopped. Mr and Mrs Agnew had taken on a hard-nosed resolve as the four of them sipped coffee in the country-style kitchen that looked out over the enormous rear lawn.

‘I’m sorry we had to put you through that,’ Dani said, before taking a sip of rich coffee.

‘You’re just doing your job, Detective,’ Linda responded. ‘We’d already built ourselves up for the worst.’

‘We’re both just in shock,’ Peter added.

‘You’ve probably been over this with the Missing Persons team, but can you think of any reason why your daughter has gone missing? Anywhere she might now be?’

‘I’ll be honest with you, we haven’t always gotten along,’ Peter said. ‘We loved her dearly, but she wasn’t an easy child. We haven’t been close for some time.’

‘But she’s not a child now. She’s twenty-six years old.’

‘She’s still our child. And she was immature for her age.’

‘Peter, that’s not true at all,’ his wife scolded, her distaste at his comment clear.

‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘She dropped out of university three times. She couldn’t hold any job for more than six months before getting bored or sacked or both.’

‘Because you were always so stable in work, right?’

‘I did just fine, thank you very much,’

‘But you never exactly had a strong work ethic. She’s more like you than you realise. Stubborn. Single-minded. Easily distracted because you’re always thinking about the next project.’

Peter said nothing to that. They stopped their bickering. Linda gave Dani an apologetic look.

‘What about friends?’ Easton asked. ‘Have you spoken to them? Is there anyone you think we should be speaking to?’

The Agnews both thought about that question for a while.

‘The thing is, we really didn’t know her group of friends that well,’ Linda said. ‘Not recently at least.’

‘Recently?’ Dani asked.

‘She’s been living over in Bournville for the last eighteen months or so. We really haven’t had much contact with her since then.’