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and Brendan had gone missing it had been hard.
    How long ago it seemed. Five years and four months.
    She was twelve years old and felt wounded by the disappearance of her mother as if actual blood had been drawn from her. She spent a long time on her own in the rooms that Anna had set aside. Her frosty grandmother left her to her own devices and so she watched television and read and stared out of her bedroom window into the smart back garden. Each week that passed took her further from her old life. Joshua was in Newcastle, living with his uncle. There were some phone calls between them but they were always awkward. The easy intimacy they’d shared in the house on Brewster Road had disappeared and after she had asked him how school was she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
    Those first weeks it seemed as though she was the one who had vanished. It was as if she’d been out walking and suddenly spirited away into this other life. Now she was in a strange room, in a large house where the sound of her own footsteps echoed up and down the stairs and along the hallways. She was living with her grandmother, Anna, a woman who hardly ever spoke to her, whose eyes seemed to follow her round the room. She had a sense sometimes that her old life in Brewster Road was going on without her. That all the stuff about her mother and Brendan going missing had been some bad dream. It was she who had been taken, not them.
    Now Rose sat up in bed. It was 1.03 a.m. She absolutely couldn’t sleep. She put her dressing gown on and went through her study and into the hallway. She intended to go downstairs and make a hot drink but was distracted by a glow further along the corridor. It was coming from the Blue Room. The door was slightly open and there was light spilling out. She walked quietly towards it and heard an odd sound. She waited outside. It was Anna. She was sniffing and blowing her nose. And then she recognised the sound. Her grandmother was crying.
    Rose stepped inside.
    Anna was holding a child’s nightdress. It was pink with drawings of rabbits all over it. It looked old-fashioned and had lace around the neck and sleeves; real lace that someone had crocheted. Anna looked up.
    ‘Are you all right?’ Rose said, walking across.
    On the ground, in front of her grandmother, was an open wooden chest. Inside it were toys and clothes and books.
    ‘Katherine’s childhood things,’ Anna said. ‘I collected them together. One day I thought I might show them to her, give them to her. But she left when she was eighteen and I never saw her again . . .’
    Anna stopped and hugged the nightdress fiercely.
    ‘I never got the chance to tell her . . . anything.’
    Rose put her hand out and laid it on Anna’s shoulder.
    ‘You could give them to me,’ she said.
    Anna turned and stared at Rose. In an instant she seemed to pull herself together. ‘You’re a sweet girl, Rose. I haven’t always been able to say how nice it has been . . .’ She stood up, wiping her face with a hanky. ‘I’m so sorry, did I wake you?’
    Rose shook her head. ‘I thought I might make a hot drink. Do you fancy a coffee?’
    ‘That would be good. A latte, I think.’
    Rose let Anna walk out of the room first. Then she glanced back at the wooden box, its contents unpacked, the nightie left lying over the side. Her mother’s childhood possessions, left behind, just like all the stuff at Brewster Road.

FIVE
     
    Henry Thompson made the arrangements for Rose and Joshua to go to the house in Brewster Road. Joshua drove there in the Mini and parked the car at the other end of the road away from the crime scene tape and the police cars and vans.
    They sat for a few minutes while Rose told Joshua about Munroe’s visit to her grandmother’s. It had been four days since it happened and she’d considered telling him by text or email but both seemed too inflammatory. She was afraid that he might go back to Munroe’s offices in Chelsea and have a row with