Anne waved him away with a hand before he could touch her. There was a rigidity to her body language, no room for misinterpretation. Not in front of the detectives. If ever.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said to them. ‘Neil will have to take it from here. I’m going to take Megan and wander along to pick up Charlie,’ she told him.

Neil nodded understandingly as she walked hurriedly from the room. He stood awkwardly for a moment, unsure where to put himself; apologising for himself. Then as though recovering a sense of purpose, he opened the box file and stood back, inviting them to look through its contents.

It was full of newspaper clippings, some wrapped in clear cellophane mini-wallets, others pasted on to coarse paper like items in a scrapbook.

Scrapbook didn’t seem an appropriate word, Jasmine thought. Scrapbooks were for nostalgia, for treasured memories. Perhaps that was why Anne couldn’t bring herself to give a name to the box. It had mostly stayed closed, she surmised, as even the oldest of the clippings were only slightly yellowed, the newsprint and pictures clear and not faded. It wasn’t a box Anne took out and looked through, then: more a repository where these things were shut away, but nonetheless she had felt a compulsion to preserve them.

‘As you can see,’ said Neil, ‘it was a big story for a few weeks. Anne’s grandparents collected this stuff obsessively; then the obsession passed to Anne herself. The tabloids kept it bubbling for a while by entertaining every attention-seeking chancer who happened to see someone with a carrycot and a green Audi. Sometimes I doubt they even worried about the make or colour that much. Then it trickled its way down the news agenda until being consigned to history.’

Jasmine flipped through the box, handing pages to Ingrams as she discarded them. There were clippings dating from the nineties and into the new century, sometimes small news stories and sometimes full-page features. She saw a double-page spread from 2003, folded up inside a cellophane wallet. It included a family photo of Anne with her parents, a tiny head shot of the baby inset. Opposite these were computer-generated images of how all three might look now, the new technology being the angle on which they had hung this two-page rehash of old news.

Above a sidebar was a shot of Anne playing in her garden only days before the disappearance, included because it showed the brand new green Audi 80 sitting at the side of the house. Inset into this one was a recent head shot of William Bain, the last person to see the Ramsays before they disappeared. There were a couple of quotes from him too, but understandably he had no more to say in 2003 than twenty years before that. It had been a chance encounter whose significance was only realised after the fact.