While Anna dried Josie off in the pink bedroom Middleton had allowed his granddaughter to design, they talked about things she wanted to get for Josie, things they were going to do together, and what kind of bouncy castle she wanted, because her grandfather had promised to buy her the biggest he could find. But Josie delighted in telling Mum that she wanted pints and pints of milk. Unaware of Josie’s allergy, the kidnappers had given her milk, just as Nick had feared, but there had been no illness and Josie was overjoyed to find that she was ‘normal’ now. The joy on her little lady’s face put a mixed bag of emotion in Anna, because this was a revelation that wouldn’t have come about had Josie not been kidnapped. A village of good in a world of bad.

A couple of times, Josie seemed about to broach the subject of something one of her captors had said or done and Anna changed the subject. She now knew the girls who’d taken Josie had been sweet, no worse than babysitters, but still she had no desire to let her daughter talk about them as if they were good people. Because they were not. She hoped they would rot in a cell for years.

And that brought her around to what she really wanted to talk about. She’d cycled through ways of starting this conversation and had settled on:

‘You know how you have your Calm Corner?’

She did. At school, the Calm Corner was where a naughty child got sent in order to wind down.

‘Well, Mummy did something naughty, and she has to go to the Calm Corner.’

‘At school?’

‘No, that’s for children. This Calm Corner is for adults. It’s a place where all the naughty adults get sent. Mummy will have to go there soon.’

‘Today?’

‘Not today.’ She’d already been told she’d probably get police bail, so would have a number of weeks of freedom. But there would be a custodial sentence for sure, despite any praising testimony in court from DCI Lucy Miller.

‘What did you do?’

‘I did something a long time ago and I didn’t admit to it. And some people have been hurting for a long time because of it. I can’t tell you what it is, but you’ll learn about it as you get older.’

‘We have to go on for ten minutes. Is it ten minutes?’

She wiped her wet eyes, in part to delay having to tell Josie that, no, it wasn’t going to be ten minutes. That she wasn’t going to see her mother for a long time, except for when she visited her at the adult Calm Corner.