She added Ross-on-Wye, where Lucy had grown up, where her parents and two brothers had lived. And there it was, five links down. A story in the Ross Gazette. Sweet Christ. She’d been killed in a road accident only two years ago.

Tomasz Martin (39) of Blenheim Road, Gloucester… blood alcohol level… Weston-under-Penyard…

The elderly VW Polo had veered across the centre line in the small hours of a January morning. It had taken firemen nearly an hour to free her from the wreckage. She had died at the scene. A sudden vision of it. Shattered glass like snow under the glare of arc lights, cannulas and fentanyl, steel squeaking in the jaws of a bolt cutter.

She waited for sadness to overwhelm her, but it didn’t come. Instead it was relief she felt, as if she had walked away from that fatal accident unscathed.

She scrolled down. There was a blurry photo of flowers propped against a hedge in cones of cellophane. There was a bouquet in the shape of a love heart and a bouquet in the shape of an Airedale terrier. There were handwritten notes in sandwich bags to protect them from the rain. There were tea candles in jam jars. She scrolled further down. There was a headshot, badly screen-grabbed from a website, of a woman with a snub nose and thick black hair. A different Lucy Millen altogether.

Her Lucy wasn’t dead.

She sat back, a little giddy. The world lurched to one side and slowly righted itself.

Movement overhead. She looked up and waited. There it was again… and again… Bats were slicing through the air above the garden. Pipistrelle or long-eared, probably. The air full of clicks too high for human ears.

She turned back to the phone. It felt reckless. The way you might break something fragile by rummaging in an old trunk. But she couldn’t stop. A brightly coloured picture. Click. Another brightly coloured picture. Click. The magpie in us.

Why Ross? Why not do Lucy the honour of assuming she’d escaped? Why not do her the honour of assuming she’d done precisely what she’d set out to do.

‘Lucy Millen’ Law.

She was the top hit, a barrister for Lloyd-Lloyd Chambers, specialising in immigration and human rights. She’d worked on domestic-slavery cases, on deportation cases, on cases where defendants with serious mental illnesses had been unlawfully detained in mainstream prisons. In her official photograph she was wearing a black waistcoat over a white shirt which managed to look both casual and severe at the same time. Cropped grey hair, head still tipped slightly back to give the impression that you were looking up at a woman of five foot ten, not down at a woman of five foot four. No smile. We waste our energy putting other people at ease. Only in that room with the eggshell-blue floor had the guard come down.

She felt a surge of relief, as if she had personally pulled her friend from the wreckage on that night road. Pride, too, that Lucy was still fighting the good fight. Then something less comfortable. Envy? Self-pity? Because what if the flaw lay not just in society, but deep in her own bones? What if the world had changed again and she had been left behind, just as her mother had been left behind, and she had not seen this happening?