Connor, however, was a man of at least forty, probably older. His face was a mass of lines, spots and bristle. Nell noted the tattoo on his arm – faded blue, picture no longer clear –clocked the scabs littering his balding scalp: steroids, or something more? He was bulky, so maybe the former, but a faint smell of cannabis made her think the latter. And there was a barely suppressed anger about him, not just directed towards her and Paul – for that was predictable; men like that wore their anger at police like a badge – but to his girlfriend sitting next to him, who shrank from it.

Nell began to see what Eve had seen and she didn’t like it. Connor’s height and width dominated the space around them, almost erasing Kelly-Anne’s presence. It was clear that what mattered to him was the ongoing interaction with Paul, not the girlfriend sitting next to him, and certainly not the child in the bedroom.

‘If you could just tell me again how you found Georgie,’ Paul was saying. ‘How you found her …’ he paused, ‘… like that.’

Nell watched Kelly-Anne cower in on herself, tears flowing down her cheeks. When she spoke it was with the lilt of ‘Oxford’ – the raw end of it, not the silver-spoon variety.

‘Georgie had been a bit cranky – but nothing we couldn’t cope with,’ she added hurriedly, eyes wide and fixed on Nell as if their shared gender would connect them. It didn’t.

‘I’d tried to give her a bottle but she wasn’t having it, so Connor went out for Calpol, didn’t you?’ She looked to her boyfriend with lashes covered in thick mascara, clinging on despite the tears. Connor barely managed a nod in reply.

‘You can give them Calpol you know,’ Kelly-Anne said, turning back to Nell, her tone desperate.

Nell nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

Kelly-Anne seemed to relax a little, shoulders sagging. ‘But we couldn’t get much in her so I just lay her down in her cot and left her to cry it out a bit. You can do that too, you know? It’s in the books and stuff.’

Nell nodded again. She didn’t know and likely never would, but if it was in the books, who was she to judge? She wondered how they’d met. Kelly-Anne underage and down the pub on a Friday night; Connor seeing his chance as the shots took hold; a quick fumble a few hours later, then fast forward nine months and here they were with a screaming baby in a flat provided by the council? Or was it more than that?

Nell watched the hand movements of the pair, the way she pleaded with him to hold hers, the manner in which he batted her off. Connor was an angry man, that was clear enough. But angry enough to kill a baby? Probably.