Harper checked her notes. “Less than three minutes from the call to when the first officer arrived on scene. Impressive. I guess sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time.”

Diane threw her hands in the air. “Well, there you go. If the mother hadn’t found her when she did, she most probably would have called nine-nine-nine. But she did find her, and she would have done so whether the police had been involved or not. If the shopkeeper had waited a minute or so more, the situation would have resolved itself. But there was no harm done.”

Jo thought that Diane Rathbone’s body language seemed overly defensive. She glanced at Atkinson, who gave a bland smile. To Joanna, his eyes conveyed his skepticism.

“What did you put in the report?” he said. “Will there be any follow-up?”

“I was going to hand the details to Sheffield Social Service so that they could do a routine check in six weeks’ time.”

“You were going to? You didn’t do it already? How long does it usually take?”

There was a tight pause. “I’ve got a lot on. As you can imagine. I was going to do it, and then it was the weekend, so it was going to have to wait until tomorrow. And like I said, it wasn’t a priority.”

“Was there anything on your database about them, the mother or the child? Any previous contact with Social Services?” asked Joanna.

Diane pursed her lips. “I didn’t check.”

“Oh?”

The social worker gave Jo a hard glare. “I had to remove three children from their mother this morning. Two days before Christmas. Do you know what that feels like, Detective Sergeant?”

Joanna’s voice was calm and pleasant when she said, “Have you checked now?”

Diane mumbled something incoherent.

“What’s that?”

“I said, Belinda did. Turns out the address the woman gave me was a false address.”

Harper left a pointed pause. She was starting to get very slightly annoyed by Diane Rathbone. “What I don’t understand, from what you’re telling me, is why you decided it was nothing to worry about. What was it about Constance Douglas that made you think she wasn’t a risk to the child? She’d lost her, for a good amount of time, and not thought to call for help.”

“I had to make a judgment call. I assumed she just wasn’t thinking.”

Jo had to assume that Diane wasn’t thinking either. She should have known better. As for suggesting the shopkeeper ought to have waited to call 999, no social worker worth their salt would recommend a delay in alerting the authorities if a child was found alone on the street in wintery conditions. The cold Diane was suffering from must have been brewing for days; perhaps it had skewed her judgment.