For two days she had been reserved and nervous, confined to the house, barely eating, napping in the day a lot, and talking about leaving the city. Strange half-asleep mumblings about a fresh start soon became a sincere desire to leave London. Wildly in love and eager to please, Nick had agreed that getting out of London would be a good fresh start for them both. Aided by her father, who’d bought her a house in Sheffield to guarantee that his daughter – and the child she planned to have – remained close, she and Nick had been packed and gone within two weeks. But not because goat lovers swore vengeance, or because a thief with a blade proved the city had dangerous streets.

Anna had fled because she’d killed a pair of hikers on a dark road.

Bennet was suddenly by his side again, giving the dead eye. ‘Why take the car out of the city, Nick, when London has a thousand scrapyards? A connection. By Anna’s reaction to the name, I knew that connection wasn’t anything as lowly as simply scrapping her car here based on a friend’s recommendation. Something bigger. Something she couldn’t tell the police. Something that propelled her to run today. Normally we would assume that connection was a person. But she scrapped a perfectly good car based on some robbery attempt story never reported to the police. She scrapped it right around the time that police were looking into similar cars because of a hit-and-run. And then she left the city under a new name.’

Hearing it like that, it all seemed so obvious. But still Nick refused to believe it.

Miller spoke next. ‘Nick, once Anna’s car was cleared by the London police, that was the end of their interest in it. They didn’t know she later scrapped it and drove way out of the city to do so. They didn’t know she’d been a shivering wreck after an incident on the night of the hit-and-run. And of course they couldn’t possibly know that someone from that scrapyard would kidnap her daughter eight years later.’

Back to Bennet. ‘The people who took her know what she did. They knew about the swapped cars because they set it up and fudged the paperwork, which was the final piece of evidence we needed in order to be sure of our suspicions. The kidnappers took Josie because of the hit-and-run.’