Diane’s first thought is I don’t have time for this. She keeps driving, grimly determined to go home, thinking that she deserves a bit of rest now despite whatever this is. Probably nothing anyway. It’s Sunday, and she’s just removed three children from their mother, having been called in on her day off. The mother is a drug user, but it’s mostly her partner the children are being protected from: there’s a legal order of no contact between the man and the children, but the mother seems as addicted to him as she is to the heroin. Diane took them early this morning, with the help of specially trained enforcement officers. She unpeeled the middle one’s fingers from the mother’s scarred and unresisting wrist, carried her to the car. She delivered them to foster carers, all three children stunned and dirty and the little one screaming his head off. Diane is brewing a cold. She just wants a sit down, and have a cup of tea and some more painkillers.

She turns off the radio, but she can still hear the announcer in her head, like an echo. “A missing woman, and a child between eighteen months and two years old.” On Friday. In Cleethorpes. From Sheffield. Could be a coincidence, she thinks. It can’t be the two she had in the police car, outside the shop, the nice woman, the big fuss over nothing. Constance and Leonie, the mother she’d spoken to, that she let go without so much as a background check. The little girl they found on the seafront, who turned out to be not abandoned, but simply lost. Surely not. And yet she is suddenly filled with the cold possibility that she’s made a giant, career-derailing mistake.

She feels sick and giddy, and fears that she’ll lose control of the car. She manages to pull up in a side street and turn off the engine. Closing her eyes, Diane takes one slow breath, then another.

She literally jumps in her seat when her phone starts ringing. It is Belinda, the senior social worker for the area. Her voice is as harsh as dogs barking in Diane’s ear.

“I’ve just had a call from Detective Sergeant Joanna Harper at Greater Yorkshire Police. She says police officers attended a missing child incident of yours on Friday, and the mother is a person of interest in an inquiry into a serious assault. I can’t find anything on the database.”

Diane doesn’t say anything. She hears the blood rushing in her ears.

“Diane? Are you still there? What’s the reference? Name of the mother? Maybe you made a mistake inputting the date.”

“No, it’s not that. I didn’t write it up yet.”

This time Belinda doesn’t say anything. She clears her throat with such powerful passive aggression that Diane shivers.