Mr Mitchell looks straight down the lens of the camera. ‘This is a plea from our family to everyone in the community. Please think carefully and consider if you know anything that could be related to my daughter’s disappearance. Cast your minds back to the weekend. You might have seen something that you thought unimportant at the time. Nothing is too small to report.’

A police hotline number sits at the bottom of the screen.

I still have the sourness in my gut that’s been there since I saw the very first news report. It’s a queasy, guilty feeling because I’m not sure if I’m genuinely worried about Yin, or if I’m more worried about myself. I can’t remember the reasons why I thought it was a good idea to transfer to Balmoral, and now the universe has presented me with a great big reason to not be there.

Mum knots the thread and breaks it between her teeth. She moves onto the second hole in my tights. ‘By the way, your dad called.’

I raise one eyebrow. When I was twelve I spent a whole summer practising this new expression for my new cynicism. Mum and Dad separated when I was eight and divorced when I was ten, but when I was twelve Dad went to Western Australia to work on the mines and didn’t come back for three years. He said he was doing it for Sam and me, to save for our futures, but instead he bought a house on the other side of town with his mate Jarrod, and I don’t see how that benefits us. The house has been the source of a lot of fights between Mum and Dad, but Mum seems to have let it go now.

‘Don’t give me that look, Chloe. Call him and have a quick chat. It won’t cost you a thing.’

‘Okay. Ma, okay.’ I wave Mum’s fussing away. Dad and I spoke on my birthday, which wasn’t that long ago. The senior detective is being questioned onscreen and I don’t want to miss it.

‘Are the police treating this case as linked to the Karolina Bauer abduction?’ asks a journalist.

‘That’s the exchange student who was taken a few years ago,’ I say.

The lead detective looks like the kind of man you’d see in a department store catalogue modelling clothes for older men, not a hunter of psychopaths. ‘At this early stage we’re examining all angles, including looking at previous cases.’

‘Early?’ says Mum. ‘It’s been four days—that’s way too long. The first 48 hours are crucial.’

Mum consumes a solid and unvaried diet of crime fiction—it’s her main hobby. She could probably have a decent stab at heading up a police investigation based on that alone.