Margot will never forget the dreadful day when she first met Ruthgow. Before that, before he came on the scene, there were other officers. The first was a woman who took notes while Margot cried on Leo’s shoulder, pleading with them to do something, anything to find Flora and that, no, she wasn’t the sort of girl to run away from home and, no, she’d never done anything like this before. And then a detective – a man this time – had questioned everybody, those staying on the campsite as well as Leo, Heather, Jessica, Flora’s friends – not that there were many – and the boy she’d been ‘seeing’, Dylan Bird. This had shocked Margot. She’d told the male officer, DC Lovelace (she’d never forgotten the name, mainly because it didn’t fit with the square-jawed, gruff young officer), that she hadn’t known Flora had a boyfriend. That was a mistake, of course, because then it was assumed that Flora was the type of girl to keep secrets from her mother, her family, that she was precocious, up to no good and had probably run away. But her savings account hadn’t been touched, her passport hadn’t been taken from where Margot kept it, along with hers and Heather’s, in an old suitcase on top of the wardrobe in the spare room. Her clothes and possessions were untouched. There were no signs that Flora had run away. And Margot knew, in the sixth-sense way only a parent can, that something bad had happened to her daughter.

And then, after Flora had been missing for three agonizing days, when Margot had thought she’d go out of her mind with worry, Gary Ruthgow had turned up.

He was a detective sergeant then and had sat in her living room, next to a female detective, who looked like Anita Dobson, on her shabby old sofa with the dog hairs and the threadbare arms and told her they’d made ‘a significant discovery’. Flora’s bloodstained blouse had been found in the undergrowth at the end of the lane, which turns onto the high street, sniffed out by a dog. It was the blouse she had been wearing the day she disappeared.

Margot had had to stuff her whole fist into her mouth to stop herself screaming and the woman officer had placed a hand on her arm, her blue eyes full of warmth and sympathy. Leo had come in then, and he’d held her as she sobbed, telling her it didn’t mean anything. That Flora could still be alive. It was only a blouse, he’d said. Only a blouse.

But she knew. She just knew. Flora was dead.