But the police wouldn’t let him leave the house. They’d told him not to go anywhere and had taken the car key. He couldn’t help but worry that they still suspected him of involvement in Josie’s kidnap. He and Anna both.

He didn’t understand this suspicion. Back when he’d been suspected of taking Josie, certain points had been raised: how would Josie attend school, or a doctor’s, or join any other part of society if Nick tried to keep their location secret? Impossible. And the same points negated the notion that Anna had run away with her daughter. She was certainly smart enough to have set this whole thing up, but also smart enough to realise it would be a fool’s errand. Anna had known Nick was innocent because of this, but the police hadn’t believed it; now Nick, for the same reason, knew she was blameless here. Again the police had serious doubts, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Knowing she was innocent meant also knowing something far worse:

That Anna was now in terrible danger, too.

When Miller called him inside with news, Nick felt relief. But it was only partly a desire for information. He was sitting at the garden bench and staring at Josie’s toys scattered in the turned earth in the corner. He’d expected to feel joy at seeing his girl’s things, like using photographs to remember a great holiday, but they were beginning to heighten his sense of loss instead. So partly it was to get away.

The detective was sitting in the dining/incident room, alone. When Nick sat across from her, she lifted a sheet of paper. An old photocopy of a sale receipt for Anna’s scrapped Fiat Punto, dated 19th September 2011, from their paperwork file in the cubbyhole. She was waiting for a response. Some kind of detective tactic, maybe.

‘Is this scrapyard connected to the kidnap?’ He made an impatient hand gesture for her to get to the point.

She tapped the business title at the top: Watson-Bruce Salvage, with a Northampton address.

His jaw dropped. ‘Dominic Watson-Bruce, he knows Anna?’

‘It’s a family-run business, has been for generations, and the owner, Dominic’s father, lives on-site. He’s divorced, but Dominic, according to his mother, lives there. Which means he was probably there in September 2011. But Dominic, he’s only nineteen, so he would have been eleven back when Anna scrapped her car. A child. But, my friend, this is intriguing because you both lived in London, yet Anna chose to scrap her car sixty miles away.’

‘But you think she knows someone from that scrapyard? Whoever took Josie? All she ever told me was that that place came as a recommendation from a friend. I don’t know who. I remember thinking it was a long way to go. I had to go with her the second time to drive her back.’