Porter reached across and spun the picture back round. That would make Natasha nineteen or twenty when it was taken. She had an arm wrapped around the waist of the man Porter now knew to be Nathan Barclay. They wore matching black T-shirts with the iconic tongue and ruby red lips that had long since been synonymous with The Stones. There was no mistaking them for anything but father and daughter. Her hair, so dark it was practically black, matched his, and two sets of identical blue eyes, creased at the corners at the promise of the evening to follow, stared back at Porter. He nodded a silent hello to Natasha, glad for a face to focus on. It made her finally feel real.

Porter decided to change tack. ‘You and her father were divorced when he died, is that right?’

‘Yes, we’d been apart for a few years by the time he passed away.’

‘And do you think she blamed you for the break-up?’ asked Porter.

Mary Locke paused for a moment before replying. ‘I’m not perfect, Detective. We all make mistakes. Mine was that I fell in love with someone other than my husband.’

It might just have been a trick of the light, but Porter thought it looked as if her eyes were glistening a touch more, a precursor to tears.

‘Nathan was a good man, but not always easy to live with. He’d worked hard to build up his business and by the time he … well … you know … It had been losing money long before we split up, and he’d had to sell up to pay off his debts. Things like that take their toll on any man.’

‘If you don’t mind, Mrs Locke, we don’t have much information on what happened to Nathan other than that he took his own life. Can you fill in the blanks for us?’

‘What does that have to do with Natasha?’ she asked, looking puzzled.

‘Maybe nothing’ – Porter shrugged – ‘but if nobody has seen her since around that time, it might help us understand her frame of mind, where she might have gone, that kind of thing.’

She swallowed hard. These were the types of memory that people kept locked up as tightly as possible, and stored in the darkest of recesses. Her eyes danced from side to side in short staccato movements.

‘Nathan … he, um … he shot himself. It happened in one of his warehouses.’ The glistening in her eyes finally gathered enough momentum and turned into matching menisci of tears, balancing on her lower eyelid. ‘Sorry,’ she said, forcing a nervous smile. ‘Even though we were apart by then, it was still hard, you know?’