‘Luke’s first girlfriend, Amy Lowe, I suppose. She still lives in Suffolk, though, so—’

‘Right then, let’s go,’ she said, getting up.

Mac blinked at her. ‘What, now?’

‘We’ve got nothing else to do.’ She picked up her coat. ‘We’ll take your car, shall we? Do you have her address?’

He nodded. ‘An old school friend of mine still knows her vaguely.’

For the first time since Luke went missing, Clara felt her spirits lift. ‘We’ll drop in on Rose and Oliver on the way,’ she said as they headed for the door.

As they eased slowly through the London traffic, Clara again checked Facebook. Since she’d appeared on TV there’d been a constant stream of messages from friends and well-wishers asking her how she was, whether there’d been any news, telling her they were thinking of her. And though she was touched by their concern she’d grown to dread their messages appearing in her inbox, feeling obliquely guilty when the only possible reply she could give was, ‘No, still nothing I’m afraid.’ Today, however, she checked through them eagerly, yet over twenty-four hours since she’d first contacted her, there was no reply from ‘Rumpelteazer’. Perhaps it had all been a sick joke. She sighed and allowed her phone to drop to her lap. She glanced at Mac. ‘What was she like, this Amy?’

He shrugged. ‘Nice. She and Luke were pretty serious back then. I know he was really keen on her.’

She remembered the pictures she’d seen in Luke’s photo albums. An attractive, curvy teenager, with big blue eyes and blond waves – the sexy girl-next-door type that the boys at school always went for. In the photos she and Luke invariably had their arms around each other, surrounded by happy crowds of friends, faces flushed, eyes shining, taken at some party or other. She felt another pang of doubt; it seemed so unlikely that someone so sweet-looking could have sent such threatening emails.

She stared out of the window, watching as the city’s outskirts segued into the green and yellow fields of Essex. For a while they drove in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, until Mac fiddled with the stereo and Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ filled the car. A memory of the three of them listening to it on other, happier trips returned to her, visits to Glastonbury and Camp Bestival, someone’s wedding in Hampshire to which they’d travelled in a huge convoy of cars filled with all their friends.