Stepping back, Bailey glanced around, noticing that on the wall above Jennifer’s desk was tacked a fashion poster with a Roaring Twenties theme. Her parents had brought it back from a fashion exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, knowing at the time how much Jennifer was growing to adore fashion and glamour. The picture was a stylised depiction of a tall, dashing man wearing a black fedora hat accompanied by a slender, glamorous-looking woman clad in a long slim gown. Bailey had always thought the reason Jennifer had given Mister Snigiss a fedora hat was because it was what the man in the poster was wearing.

Underneath the window was a bookcase stuffed with a collection of children’s books. There were a fair few on fashion, along with several on the Ancient Egyptians – a subject Jennifer had reserved a special passion for – and also a number of books on snakes and reptiles. As she’d grown older, Jennifer had wanted a pet snake, but her parents had refused, so Mister Snigiss had got one instead, and he’d called it Sid. Just like Mister Snigiss, Bailey hadn’t been able to see Sid either.

For all these years, Bailey had assumed that Mister Snigiss had been nothing more than an amalgamation of various elements of Jennifer’s childhood interests, mashed together into a fantasy figure who could fulfil the demands of her powerful imagination. All those elements were present in this room right now. The man with his fedora hat… The books on snakes… But maybe Bailey had got it wrong. Maybe there really was more to Mister Snigiss, just like her father had always said. There was only one way to find out.

She rolled up her sleeves and got to work. Pulling open the drawers of the dresser, she began to riffle through Jennifer’s possessions, taking out all of her clothes and running her hands through the pockets, hoping to find some fresh clue as to the true identity of Mister Snigiss. Soon the floor around her was strewn with Jennifer’s garments. Her father would have been furious at the mess she was creating in here, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it now.

Kneeling down by the bookcase, she pulled out all of the books, flicking through each and every one of them, seeing if they concealed some hidden note or photograph, then dropping them on the carpet when she was done.

Standing up, she went over to the desk and rummaged through all of Jennifer’s schoolwork – the exercise books containing her project on snakes, her project on the Ancient Egyptians and her primitive efforts at creative writing. There was a pile of Jennifer’s sketchbooks and Bailey leafed through every one of them, examining all of the pictures in detail, and then she turned her attention back to the pictures that were stuck up on the wall and scrutinised all of them as well.

A good hour or two had passed by the time she’d finished. Her hair was ruffled and she’d broken into a sweat. The room was in complete disarray, Jennifer’s belongings piled hither and thither around her. It felt like she’d gone over every square inch of the bedroom.