Updating control, she attached her call sign to the address of Elsie Abraham, another school acquaintance she had lost touch with. Elsie had always been an outsider. Her Presbyterian parents had emigrated from America to start up a branch of their church in the UK. Sarah had tried to include her, but her odd turn of phrase and strange dress sense set her apart from the crowd. She first met her parents in Tesco Metro when she was packing bags to raise money for the Girl Guides. Their faces stiff with holiness, they quoted bible passages in between beeps as the checkout girl scanned their Weetabix and potatoes. She shook her head at the memory. She never realised how many oddballs lived in Slayton until that day. Elsie’s parents ranked in the top five … no, top three of the strangest people she had ever met. Her mother was a skinny, meek woman with a thick southern American accent and Nellie Oleson curls. As for her father … an overbearing lump of a man with X-ray eyes. As his gaze roamed over Sarah’s body, it felt like he could see right through to her mismatching underwear. The disturbing thing was, he had looked at his daughter in the same way.

She programmed Elsie Abraham’s address into the satnav and started the engine for the short drive up the hill. Elsie’s abode was on the outskirts of Upper Slayton and had yet to be included in the restoration taking place. There was no proper front garden at Elsie Abraham’s terraced home, just a rusty gate off its hinges, a concrete frontage and an overstuffed green wheelie bin. Next to it were recycling tubs filled with empty chocolate milk cartons and cardboard containers that once housed crisp and chocolate multipacks. As a pre-teen, Elsie had eaten for comfort. Now, she either had a huge family, or her eating habits hadn’t improved.

Sarah pressed her finger on the stiff plastic doorbell to hear a quirky rendition of ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ from inside. ‘Just a minute!’ a high-pitched voice shrieked from within. Sarah was about to lift the letterbox to check she was OK, when a shadow filled the door pane. It was Elsie – or at least, she thought it was, as she was greeted at the door. Sarah kept her expression fixed, her shock hidden behind the smile she portrayed to the world. Elsie wasn’t just overweight now; she was morbidly obese. Sweat-shiny and panting, she could barely stand. Her hair was pulled back into a long thin pigtail, her polyester smock stretched to its limits across her chest.

‘I’m DC Sarah …’ she began to introduce herself, proudly raising her warrant card in the air. It had been years since she’d last seen her. Would Elsie recognise her now?