Nancy blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and turned to look up at Bailey.

‘As you probably know by now, Bailey, family is very important to me,’ she said in her husky smoker’s voice. ‘And that means I’m curious about your family. Why don’t you tell me a little bit more about them?’

While it might have seemed like quite an innocent question, Bailey was keenly aware that it could be a further more subtle way of probing her identity.

‘Sure,’ she said casually, concealing her inner wariness. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘You told me you had a sister. What was her name?’

Bailey hesitated a moment, but then reasoned to herself that information from her childhood was far enough removed from the present to be a relatively harmless thing to reveal to Nancy.

‘Her name was Jennifer.’

‘Jennifer,’ echoed Nancy, her eyes narrowing.

Bailey saw Nancy soaking it up like a sponge and had no doubt that this woman’s canny mind was adept at storing every tiny nugget of information for later retrieval, not dissimilar to how Bailey’s own mind worked. After all, you never knew when a fact could come in handy or assume later significance.

‘How old was she when she died?’ said Nancy.

‘She was eight. I was six.’

‘Do you remember much about her?’ said Nancy.

Bailey smiled. ‘She loved the Ancient Egyptians. She was really into them.’

‘The Ancient Egyptians?’ Nancy laughed. ‘Pyramids. Hieroglyphs. Tutankhamun. Yeah, kids love that kind of thing, don’t they?’

‘She was pretty,’ added Bailey. ‘She’d probably be really beautiful if she was alive today.’

Bailey wasn’t lying about that, for it often crossed her mind what Jennifer would have been like as an adult.

‘Did you get on well?’

‘Yes, we did. As older sisters go, she was kind to me.’

Nancy perused her with curiosity, and if Bailey wasn’t mistaken, also a glimmer of sympathy. ‘Must have been hard for your parents to explain to you, at that age.’

‘It was. I didn’t really understand at the time. All I knew was one minute Jennifer was there and the next minute she was gone, and I didn’t have anyone to play with any more.’

The large gulf of time had distanced Bailey sufficiently from those events to allow her to talk about them with a certain amount of detachment, as she was doing now.

Nancy paused for a few moments. ‘Can I ask how she died?’

Bailey contemplated Nancy’s question. Once again she saw no reason not to tell the truth.

‘She was abducted off the street. Randomly. Just like that. She was never seen again. They never found her body. No trace of her at all. I think that’s what my parents found most difficult. No closure.’

‘That’s awful,’ said Nancy, shaking her head. ‘To lose someone in that way.’

There was a sensitivity in Nancy’s voice which Bailey hadn’t detected before, something almost maternal and reassuring, and Bailey suddenly found herself wanting to confide in more detail about Jennifer’s disappearance – her father’s fruitless searching, her mother’s descent into religion…