‘Never.’ She spun on her heels quick enough to have Joel ducking away from her flicked hair. She resumed pacing.

‘DC Ribbons was investigating a blackmail offence. Five teenage girls were victims, but she knew there was a sixth girl, didn’t she? Your daughter, is it Emma?’ Joel took back over.

‘She’s gone.’ This time the pacing stopped at the furthest point and Marilyn was facing away, her head lifted like she might be staring at the pulled curtains. ‘She’s gone and she won’t be coming back.’

‘DC Ribbons was as good as her word. There’s nothing in the casefile about Emma, but she wrote notes when she met with you. What was it, three times?’

‘Three times. She didn’t write anything.’ Marilyn was still facing away.

‘She would have written her notes after then, but she put in there what happened to Emma, what you told her.’

This was the longest pause yet, enough for Joel to fix on the sound of cars passing the front.

‘My Emma …’

‘DC Ribbons left her alone, didn’t she? She didn’t force the issue, she knew Emma’s mental health was suffering enough already. But that wasn’t the main reason, was it?’ Joel said.

‘You can’t be here. It’s been too long, it’s been too long now.’ Marilyn turned to set off, her pace quicker.

‘Your husband – Nicholas – that’s right, isn’t it? He’s a very controlling man but he struggled with Emma. She’s a fourteen-year-old girl, after all, and teenage girls don’t react well to being controlled, do they?’

‘You need to leave, you need to take that car away.’

‘You moved here to get away from him, to get you both away from him, but it didn’t work, did it? It wasn’t far enough. And Hannah was going to help you get away from him for good. That’s why you haven’t even unpacked, isn’t it?’

Marilyn’s voice was now little more than a whisper and it was directed downwards, like she was coaching herself. ‘I can’t do this, not again. Hannah was good to me, she was good to me … she was so good to me. I felt safe with her …’

‘You had a deal, an agreement, Hannah wrote that down too.’ Joel pushed on, despite the obvious increase in Marilyn’s stress levels. He was near the end of what he knew, of what he had managed to decipher from Hannah’s shorthand updates and what he could take from Marilyn’s reactions. ‘What were you going to tell her when she got you safe? Something about your husband, maybe the reason why you’re so scared of him?’ Marilyn still paced, her head still down, her headshakes almost constant, her lips moving with incoherent mumbles. Joel waited her out.