‘They won’t know she’s got a milk allergy, though.’ He felt anger rising. ‘They could have at least taken her damn soy milk with them.’

He reached out to trace his finger across the sun on Josie’s latest drawing. Anna’s hand laid atop his.

‘It’s July, but she misses the snow already. We could go to Iceland. Josie would love the rocket ship church, and the Blue Lagoon.’

The picture was the usual suspect: dodgy-looking line house with a spiky sun and stick family far too big for the thin garden path. Nick’s form was bigger than the others, because he was Josie’s giant dad, the superhero, but the perspective made it appear as if his stick representation was ahead of Anna and Josie, closer than the house. Further from it. Parted from them. As if walking away. Going to work, Josie had said, and she’d called it BUSY DAY, but that wasn’t how Nick saw it now. He chose to believe Josie had painted him apart from the others because she had sensed the breakdown between her parents.

There was a beep from his pocket. He registered the single beep by his expression, but made no move to take the item out of his pocket because Anna was watching him.

She didn’t miss a thing, though: ‘Is that a phone?’

‘Back in a minute.’ He went out and slipped into the bathroom, unseen, and locked the door and pulled out the phone.

It was time to do this.

Six

She managed three minutes, but by then there was more worry than curiosity. Anna stepped out into the hallway but didn’t see Nick. She could hear voices from the bedroom and the living room. But not Nick’s.

Nabi said, ‘I think HOLMES is a bit silly. I mean the name. HOLMES, with L for large and M for major. Large major enquiry?’

‘It’s a major enquiry, and it’s a large one,’ someone replied. It sounded like the young pregnant detective, Hicks.

She noticed the bathroom door was shut.

‘Murder cases are all large, and major means big. So it’s like saying a large big enquiry.’

‘What I mean, fool, is that it’s a major enquiry, but it’s the system that’s large. Large system for major enquiries.’

‘You just thought of that. That’s not what you said.’

Anna realised they were discussing the name of the police computer database. They would have used that, of course. Fed in information, or however it worked, with a hope of finding who took Josie. She went to the bathroom door and tried it. Locked.

DC Hicks said, ‘HOLMES, though, is from Sherlock Holmes. They had to cover the L and the M in the acronym. With no L it sounds like an estate agent’s system.’