‘I’m just going upstairs for a bit,’ she said.

Her mother nodded absently and continued to drink her tea.

Leaving the kitchen, Bailey trudged up the stairs and padded along the carpeted landing to stop outside Jennifer’s bedroom. Stuck to the door was a ceramic plaque inscribed with the words ‘Daddy’s Little Princess’ surrounded by pink hearts and yellow stars. Jennifer had always been her father’s favourite. It was a fact Bailey had accepted from an early age, to the extent that she never really questioned it, although as she’d grown older she’d occasionally wondered if her father would have demonstrated quite the same determination to find her had she been the one who’d gone missing instead of Jennifer. However, despite those occasional misgivings, she knew her father did love her deeply, and that was the important thing.

With some reluctance, Bailey pushed down the door handle and entered the room for what was probably the first time in almost ten years. She’d long made a habit of avoiding Jennifer’s bedroom, mainly because of the way her father insisted on preserving it exactly the way it had been the day she’d gone missing. It seriously creeped Bailey out.

The bed was neatly made with a My Little Pony bedspread and pillows, above which perched a row of soft toys lined up along the headboard. Bailey remembered the name of only one of them now – Claude, a loveable elephant standing at the far end of the row.

Hanging from the ceiling was the dinosaur mobile Jennifer had made in school from coloured felt, coat hangers and bits of cardboard. Now it was draped with a fine grey gossamer of cobwebs undulating in the air currents generated by Bailey’s presence.

On the floor by her desk were her collection of Barbie dolls, their plastic faces frozen in miniature pouts, waiting patiently for their owner to return.

Stuck to the walls were a variety of Jennifer’s crude and garish felt-tip drawings, the paper now curling and yellowing with age, the corners discoloured from the oil leached out of the ancient Blu Tack. It was one of these pictures that now resided in Bailey’s purse, taken from the wall by her father, the only depiction of Mister Snigiss he’d been able to find.

She moved closer to the wall to pore over the pictures. She herself featured in a fair few of them – a little stick figure, smaller than the one which was Jennifer, both of them engaged in adventures of one form or another.

It had been Jennifer who’d always initiated their games, who’d been the prime architect of that fantasy world, with Bailey, two years younger, running around after her, looking up to her older sister. On any given day, the two of them might be princesses, pirates, or even animals of some sort, playing along with a host of imaginary beings whom Jennifer had endowed with names and whole lives of their own, drawn up from the wellspring of her fertile imagination.