Still, a birthday was always a good excuse for a celebration with friends… but when your birthday fell on Christmas Day, friends tended to be with their own families, and these days most of her friends from school and university were married with kids, which made it all the more difficult to catch up. So, for the time being, it was just her and her parents…

And to that end, Christmas dinner had been much like all the previous ones that she could remember: the turkey had been too dry – her mother never got it quite right – but her dad’s stuffing had been excellent as usual; it was the only dish he knew how to make.

Although there were three of them sitting at the table, four places had actually been set. It had been the same every Christmas for the past twenty-four years or so, ever since Bailey’s older sister Jennifer had gone missing at the age of eight years old, abducted off the street without a trace. Her father insisted on laying a place for Jennifer, resolute in his belief that she was still out there somewhere alive, vainly convinced that his efforts to find her would one day bear fruit. Bailey’s mother had long ago lost the will to argue with him, and Bailey herself knew that raising any objection to his delusions would only result in a big row, and no one wanted that at Christmas. So no one said anything.

Bailey noticed her mother frowning at her.

‘You know, you don’t look very happy, Bailey.’ Her face broke into a beaming smile. ‘Today is a day of joyous celebration.’

‘I’m fine,’ lied Bailey.

‘Today is the day that our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world. You should feel privileged to share your birthday with Him.’

Her mother had become increasingly religious as she’d grown older and her social life now almost exclusively revolved around her church. For Bailey’s combined Christmas and birthday present, she’d bought her a silver hairgrip in the shape of a fish.

‘It’s an ancient Christian symbol,’ her mother had explained. ‘It’s a fish.’

‘Yeah I can see that,’ Bailey had replied, turning it over in her hands. The minimalist design consisted of little more than two intersecting arcs of thin flat silver, the tips joining at one end to form the nose, and crossing at the other end to form a tail.

‘In ancient times, during the darkest days of Roman oppression, when those brave few who followed the Christian faith—’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ Bailey had said, cutting her off. ‘I’m sure it’ll come in very handy.’ Once her mum got started on Christian matters she never shut up and sometimes Bailey just couldn’t stomach it; she didn’t possess any religious convictions whatsoever, having confronted far too many acts of senseless evil in her line of work to trust in any form of divine goodness or justice.

Her father had bought her The Bumper Book of Cryptic Crosswords, knowing how fond she was of them.