For the past two nights she had lain awake, going over and over every moment of her and Emily’s conversation. Had Clara scared her off by asking too many questions? Or was something, or someone, preventing her from making contact again? When she finally slept her dreams were plagued by visions of Emily in distress, trapped somewhere dark and terrifying, her face morphing into Luke’s. She’d often wake, her throat constricted with fear, too anxious and upset to go back to sleep.

Wherever she went, whatever she did, Emily was never far from her thoughts and she began to dread Rose’s calls, the guilt she felt when she heard her voice almost unbearable, knowing that with a few choice words she could put an end to so many years of uncertainty. Yet she couldn’t shake the suspicion that Emily was somehow protecting her parents by refusing to see them; that telling Rose and Oliver might put them in danger. And though Emily had said that her and Luke’s disappearances weren’t linked, Clara wasn’t entirely sure she had believed her. Also, she had given her word she’d let Emily go to them herself when the time was right. There was nothing she could do except wait and hope that Emily would get in touch again – and that the next time she did, Clara would be able to unravel a little more of the mystery of what happened to her twenty years before.

Next on her and Mac’s list of women to contact was Jade Williams, the girl Luke had dated while he was at university. She tried to remember what he’d told her about this, his next serious relationship after Amy, and recalled now that he’d been unusually evasive when she’d asked him about her, had wanted in fact to change the subject as quickly as possible. She had assumed at the time that things had ended badly between them and, not wanting to pry, hadn’t pressed him further.

It was the twelfth night without Luke, and she and Mac were sitting at his kitchen table, half-heartedly playing a game of gin rummy and listening to music. She had phoned her parents earlier, and after that Zoe had called, as she did almost daily, but though it was always comforting to talk to her best friend, still it felt as though she and Mac were alone in this nightmare, bound together in a hideously tense waiting game, jumping each time the phone rang, talking incessantly in painful, circular conversations about what might happen next. Through the open window the evening sounds of the Holloway Road drifted up to them; a siren’s wail, the rumble of buses, a man shouting into his phone outside the kebab shop below.

Clara eyed Mac above her hand of cards. ‘So what was she like then, this Jade? Luke never said.’