Chloe spends more than two hours reading over old cuttings in the library. All the ones she’s read before, so they don’t turn up anything new, but she likes to refamiliarize herself with the case. After all, she can’t go over the facts too many times. Perhaps that’s how some detectives get lazy. One of the more recent articles she found had a sidebar on police procedure in cases of potential child abduction and how the first forty-eight hours are the most crucial. It included some terrifying statistic that if an abductor intends to kill the child, most do it within the first five hours after capture. That thought alone makes a mockery of the reminders of hope Maureen has dotted around Elm House and Chloe’s heart aches for her. She must redouble her efforts.

She opens an internet browser and types ‘missing children investigation’ into the search bar. A whole list of articles comes up and she devours each and every one in turn, writing notes in biro in her pale blue book as she goes. In one article from an American newspaper an expert from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children talks about how important it is to interview people who live near to the site where the child disappeared. Not once, but over and over in the hope that extra – even tiny – details might resurface with every interview. She writes that down in her book. Then wonders who she might be able to talk to. Ferry Meadows is a park, there are no houses nearby. Even the ones that back onto it now wouldn’t have been there twenty-five years ago. It’s strange to think that Park House was probably the nearest building to the play park where Angie was last seen, but even that was just a building site then. She reads on carefully, scouring for interview techniques, the expert saying that it’s not a case of asking witnesses if they noticed anything strange; even the seemingly normal, even a parked car, might be a significant detail. She writes that down too.