‘And he said, if the police know next time. If they know. Not if they’re still there. I don’t think he knew you’d called the police, Annie. Don’t you think?’

‘You’re right, but don’t you see?’ Anna said. Jane didn’t, given her puzzled look. Anna could hardly bring herself to pop the bubble. ‘It’s not Nick, so some stranger has Josie. Someone who might hurt her. And Nick’s in danger, too.’

Jane sat on the bed and shook her head. ‘But the police said…’

That word: as Anna had stumbled from the room, she’d heard it uttered loud and clear, the very same word Jane was thinking: accomplice. ‘I wish that were true. But it’s not, Jane. It’s just not. The police think it’s Nick but it’s not. We know him and they don’t. You know he wouldn’t do this. It’s not Nick and that means both of them are in danger.’

Jane’s long pause cut all the flesh off her claim: ‘We don’t know that.’

‘What did Nick do to prevent this?’ The impromptu question surprised Anna almost as much as it did Jane.

‘You mean what they said about him paying his dues?’

She had wondered that, but it wasn’t what she’d meant. ‘He was right there, Jane, when they took Josie. What did he do to stop it?’

Her sister’s shock immediately yielded to something else. ‘You need to kill that train of thought right now.’

But that thought was a rolling boulder, gathering power over time, and might already be unstoppable. Nick had been up, awake, but there had been no sound of a fight, no yelling – had he frozen in fear, like a little child himself, while strange men took everything that mattered to him?

She heard the front door slam, which cut through everything. Then the clack of high heels on her path, and her father saying something about needing petrol. He and a female police officer, heading out to his home in Loxley. His garage was where she and Nick kept all their old belongings, mostly duplicated items left over from when they moved in together and two homes became one. Someone had told her they needed to search it for information about Nick’s old life: people and places that could shed clues as to his whereabouts. So, while she’d been thinking weak, the police had continued to think guilty.

‘Father’s worried that he can’t take Josie to Mother’s,’ she said. Something else impromptu.

‘They’ll be going, don’t worry. It’s days away and Josie is coming back to us today. Isn’t she?’

It was a forceful prompt. She wasn’t sure she believed it, but she desperately didn’t want Jane to worry about her sister as well as her niece. ‘Yes, she’s coming back today.’