Over the course of serving a plate of thick-cut bacon, sausages and two fried eggs, frazzled around the edges and satisfyingly sitting in a pool of cooking fat, Mr Bradshaw mentioned that he had an appointment at the optician’s that afternoon. However, it was obvious from the slow way the landlord dealt with breakfast, screwing the lid back onto the marmalade pot with the deliberation of a man who was not in a rush, that he was set for a morning at home, which was annoying because Will would have liked to have gone back to bed. He didn’t feel he could do that with his landlord hovering around.

After breakfast, Will went back upstairs to his room and called his mother, who had calmed down now she’d had a chance to process the news about Alice. She told Will not to speak to the police without a responsible adult present ‘by which I mean a solicitor, and you let them do the talking, all right?’ and then he spent a short while searching the internet for stories about Alice Lang and Guy deVillars in case any investigative journalist had come up with anything he had missed. It didn’t seem that they had. Most of the articles were, however, focusing on police efforts to identity whoever it was that Alice had shared the champagne with on the night she disappeared. One detective was quoted as saying: ‘All previous persons of interest will be interviewed again.’ So far, no publication or media outlet had named those ‘persons of interest’ – although it was only a matter of time. Will couldn’t bring himself to search for his own name on social media although he was certain Twitter would have outed him by now. His connection to Alice Lang was no secret.

The piece that interested him most was on the Guardian Online, an article that focused on Alice’s life, rather than her death, and which reported that, at the beginning of her life, Alice had been:

given up into the care of a Brighton-based adoption agency that found homes for the illegitimate offspring of young Christian girls and placing them with families where they’d be assured a respectable, religious upbringing.