‘No. She never came back to the house, and Rupert called us in the morning to say that she hadn’t come home and to ask if we had seen her, which of course we hadn’t. We offered to help look for her, but she’d done it before. None of us realized quite how serious it was this time. The police found her car three days later…’ Amanda breaks off and I hear her blow her nose. ‘If there’s one thing I do feel guilty about, it’s that I never even noticed that she had taken her car from the garage, none of us did. If I’d realized she was driving after drinking so much, I would have gone after her, all of us would.’

‘I’m sorry I’ve made you go through it all again, Amanda,’ I say, and I mean it. I like Amanda, even if she did take a while to get used to me. Maybe in another life we would have been friends, close friends, like her and Caro.

‘Why are you even asking me this though, Emily?’ Amanda says, and there is a sharp edge to her voice now.

‘I just wanted to get things straight,’ I say. ‘I’ve only ever heard bits and pieces from different people about that night and I wanted to know what happened. How it could happen, that one day she was there and the next she wasn’t.’

‘Sadie told me that you thought she might still be alive.’

Of course she did, I think, and I am glad that I no longer have to deal with Sadie.

‘I did,’ I might as well admit it, ‘but I was wrong. You understand why I couldn’t talk to Rupert about it?’

‘Yes, but…’

I butt in before Amanda can finish her sentence, ‘Gosh, I’m so sorry – you’ll be late, won’t you? Thank you for talking to me, Amanda, we’ll catch up soon!’ and I hang up before she can respond.

Biro and Post-it notes in front of me, I write out a note for every piece of information that I have about the night Caro died. It doesn’t matter how many times I move the pieces around, I still keep coming to the same question. If Caro was wearing the earrings the night of the party – the night she disappeared – then why is one of them sitting in the jewellery box upstairs?