‘Come on, eat that toast, it’ll do you good. Actually,’ Hollie says, ‘you’re looking better already, bit more colour in your cheeks. It must be the fresh air.’

Chloe looks back at her friend, tearing her attention away from the newspaper cutting for a split second.

‘Can I . . . can I keep this?’

‘Yeah, course.’ Hollie fills her fork with another mouthful. ‘Keep it, Phil will only screw it up and use it for kindling in our wood burner. Did I tell you we had a wood burner installed? You should feel the heat it kicks out, we didn’t even have the heating on the other night and . . .’

But Chloe is busy reading:

A HEARTBROKEN couple have finally moved from their city home twenty-five years after their daughter went missing, but the pair insist they have not given up hope of her return.

Four-year-old Angela Kyle disappeared from Ferry Meadows after her father Patrick took her to play at a park there in October 1979. Mr Kyle and his wife, Maureen, have appealed for information on their missing daughter, but despite an extensive police inquiry there have been no new leads. For the last twenty-five years they have stayed in the same house, even keeping her bedroom as a shrine to little Angie, should she return. But last week they swapped their Dogsthorpe home for a Fen village.

‘It doesn’t mean we have given up hope of Angie being found,’ said Maureen Kyle from their new home in Low Drove. ‘I’m still as sure today as I was twenty-five years ago that Angie will come home one day, but it’s been hard staying in the same place, surrounded by all those memories, every fresh lead and every fresh disappointment. We needed a new start.’

Chloe looks up at Hollie. She can’t tell her what she’s thinking, that it feels to her as if Maureen is reaching out of the newspaper to reassure every doubt she’s had over the last few days. When she pictures those cuttings pulled from the wall and kicked under her bed, her temples throb and the cafe feels small and stuffy. She leans back and takes deep breaths, her forehead tingling with sweat.

Hollie looks up at her, her knife and fork wavering mid-air.

‘Oh, you’re not right, Chloe,’ she says. ‘Look, you’ve gone all pale again, and you haven’t touched your toast.’ She wipes the last of her own toast around her plate quickly. ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’

Chloe says goodbye to Hollie on the doorstep. She had to shuffle from one foot to the other, as if she needed the loo, until Hollie got the message.

As soon as she closes the door she runs up to her bedroom. There, on her hands and knees, she pulls out all the photocopies she’d pushed under her bed, releasing them from the tight angry balls she’d screwed them into.