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I drove over. I was wearing leather trousers and a leather jacket; in a holdall, I had handcuffs, my knives and the black corset I like slutty girls to wear. In my pocket, a can of Mace.

She lived on a run-down estate, the kind of place where Neighbourhood Watch means watching out for when your neighbours have gone away so you can rob them. I had driven my cheapest car, and I parked as close to her building as I could, sitting in the car for a good long time to scope out the area and find the right time to approach her flat without being noticed. There wasn’t a single passer-by in the hour that I waited, so eventually I deemed it safe to proceed.

As soon as she opened the door, before she could register that I looked nothing like the model in the photo – I am better looking – I sprayed Mace in her face, barged in and dragged her by her hair into her living room. As she recovered from the chemical blast, she opened her mouth to start screaming, so I gagged her quickly then handcuffed her wrists together and showed her my sharpest, most expensive knife. Her eyes rolled like a cow in an abattoir. She was wearing a micro-skirt that exposed a pair of fat legs. Her toenails were painted pink and she had a tattoo of a dragon on her thigh and two no-doubt-nonsensical Chinese characters on her ankle. She was in her late twenties, I guessed, but was ageing quickly.

‘You wanted some fun,’ I said. ‘Now we’re going to have some.’

I looked around. Everything was cheap, shabby, in need of repair. The kitchen was so like the one in the place where I grew up that it gave me goosebumps.

There were photos of two young children stuck with magnets to the fridge door. A boy and a girl.

‘Nod or shake your head,’ I ordered. ‘The kids. Are they yours?’

She nodded, tears trickling down the sides of her nose.

‘Where are they? With their dad?’

She shook her head.

‘Your mum?’

Yes.

‘And are they coming back tonight?’

She nodded her head vigorously. I didn’t believe her but said, ‘We’d better hurry up then, hadn’t we? You don’t want me still to be here when they get back. Your mum, your kids. I’ll kill them too. If you put up a fight, if you scream or try to hurt me, I’ll wait for them. However long it takes. But if you make this easy for me, I’ll be gone before they get back. As will you.’

She sobbed silently into her gag.

‘Let’s get started, shall we?’

I turned on the gas hob and pressed the ignition until flames whooshed into life. As the woman on the floor shook with terror, I heated the blade of a knife until it glowed red, and thought about what part of her I might like to take home.

Amy couldn’t sleep. Her head felt as if it were full of crazed bluebottles, suicide-bombing the insides of her skull. She turned from side to side, alternately wrapping the quilt around herself and throwing it off again. It was too hot, stupidly hot, the fan in the corner doing little more than push warm air from one part of the bedroom to another. She pulled off her long T-shirt and flung it across the room.

She was about to give up and put the light on, maybe catch up with some emails or read a book, when Boris, who was lying on the floor by the window, barked.

She pushed herself up on one elbow and squinted at him through the half-light. Boris never usually barked in the night.

‘What’s up?’ she said, picking up her phone at the same time to look at the clock: 3:17 in the morning.

The dog barked again, hoisting himself up on his long legs and running back and forth between the window and the bedroom door.

Feeling vulnerable, Amy retrieved her damp T-shirt from the floor and put it on, then peeked out through the curtains. Her bedroom looked out on the side of the house and across the street. There was a lamppost a few metres from the window that meant it was never fully dark in her room. The street was empty.

‘It’s OK,’ she said, patting Boris’s head. ‘There’s no one there.’

But she didn’t go back to sleep. Instead, she went into the living room and put the TV on, staring blearily at reruns of game shows until dawn, a knife beside her on the sofa and Boris lying at her feet.

‘Won’t be long,’ Amy called out to Gary from the tiny cubbyhole next to the lounge that she used as an office. She had napped during the day and felt a lot better. ‘Make yourself at home.’

She had left Gary sitting awkwardly on the edge of her sofa with his shins pressed up against her new footstool. Ordered at cost price from one of the designers who sold stuff on her own website, it was a huge custard cream and she adored it. He was looking around with something akin to astonishment at her flat with its quirky décor – well,
she
thought of it as quirky. The expression on Gary’s face indicated that he might have a different word for it. He was patting Boris’s head and stroking his ears so intently that Boris keeled over at his feet, looking up adoringly at him.

‘What do you think about those photographs?’ she added, even though she had already asked him this at least twice. The four photos ‘Becky’ had posted on her profile were of a typical palm-fringed white sandy beach from different angles. She heard Gary’s tut from the next room.

‘Sorry, sorry. It’s really playing on my—’

‘Mind,’ said Gary. ‘It’s OK, I understand. But I just don’t know. I guess we could try and find out where that beach is, when the photo was taken, that sort of thing. I’ve got a friend at work, Pete, who should know. He’s, like, really into digital photos. Want me to ask him to take a look? He wasn’t in today, off sick, but hopefully, he’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘Yes. Please.’

Amy chewed her thumbnail. There was part of her that didn’t want to know – because if there was a way of confirming that the photos really had been taken in the past week and that the beach was in Asia rather than Australia or the Caribbean, then it seemed likely Becky really had gone to Asia. And that therefore, Katherine was probably just on a bender somewhere.

She looked through the doorway at Gary. Did he think she was insane, obsessed? He didn’t seem as convinced as her that Becky hadn’t posted the pictures – or sent the email, or the mysterious tweets, come to that. Was he just going along with all of this to humour her?

No, she told herself firmly. You’re not wrong. It’s all been fake. All of it. And Gary
does
believe me. Why would Becky bother to post photos on Facebook without any captions or comments, or without replying to the surprised and envious comments of her friends? ‘Wow – lucky you, didn’t know you were going on a fab holiday!’ ‘Send us a postcard, Becks, you jammy cow!’ ‘Where’s that lush beach, babes?’

All unanswered questions – and Becky loved a Facebook chat. Somebody else must have posted the photos, just as they had sent the email and tweeted using Becky’s account. But, maddeningly, there was no proof, nothing she could show the police. In fact, the photo on Facebook would make the police even less inclined to believe her.

The printer churned out sixty sheets of A4, each of whose top half featured a drunken, beaming photo of Becky, taken at her last birthday party, which Amy had scanned in, and, in the bottom half, Katherine’s Facebook-profile photo. She was stroking a giraffe’s nose from some Kenyan safari trip she and Clive had been on at some point. Over the top of the photos, Amy had printed:

MISSING

BECKY COLTMAN AND KATHERINE DEVINE

PLEASE CALL IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ON EITHER OF THEM

Her email address was underneath, and the number of Camberwell police station.

When they finished printing, Amy shuffled them together and put them into a Manila envelope. She saw that her printer was flashing a warning to tell her that the ink was low, and she tutted. Then she remembered why the ink was low, the grim task at hand, and thought she’d spend her life savings on printer cartridges if it would only get Becky back.

‘I’m going to have to tell Mum and Dad soon,’ she said abruptly, going back into the lounge, holding the envelope. ‘They’re going to kill me already, knowing I’ve told the police and not them – but what can they do? I’ll just say I was hoping that she’d come back, and I wouldn’t need to worry them.’

Gary looked up from scrutinizing the old empty dolls’ house that Amy was now using to store all her knitting wool inside. ‘Silly question, probably, but she couldn’t be with them, could she?’

Amy shook her head. ‘No, she’s not. I didn’t think she would be, but I rang them yesterday morning to check. Well, they were out playing golf, so I spoke to their housekeeper. Becky definitely isn’t there. Right, I’m ready – shall we go?’

Gary stood up, shuffling slightly to adjust his jeans. He looked smart – his shirt was crisply ironed, he was wearing shoes instead of his usual flip-flops or trainers, and he was very clean-shaven. ‘Seeya, Boris, mate, be good,’ he said, and Boris narrowed his eyes at them both before flopping down on the tulip-shaped rug in the centre of the room.

‘Where do we start?’ Gary asked as they emerged from Leicester Square Tube station into the bedlam of a hot summer evening in the city, the air redolent of fried vegetables and exhaust fumes.

‘Let’s head for Greek Street and Old Compton Street, that area. Whatever that road is closest to Shaftesbury Avenue; then we can work up and down and back. Hope you’ve got comfy shoes on.’

Amy had always loved these sorts of evenings. Throngs of people on foot, spilling out on the pavements, annoying cab drivers, or smug in rickshaws. Tipsy and besuited, straight from work, or all dressed up for the theatre or a dinner date. Teenagers showing far too much flesh, tourists with their cameras and bumbags strapped to them like bondage, people thrusting leaflets at them for cheap pizza and comedy. Someone in a gorilla suit sauntered past on big, fake, furry claws. Amy wouldn’t have been surprised to see people in wetsuits or wedding dresses, or naked. Anything went.

But it was what was under the surface that she really wanted to discover.

They started in Dean Street, and by the tenth pub and bar they had honed their interrogation down to a set of basic questions:

‘Hi – have you got a minute? Were you working on Sunday night?’

‘Is there anyone here tonight who was?’

‘Did you happen to see this woman?’ Pointing at the picture of Katherine and the giraffe. ‘She had a date in Soho last Sunday.’

‘If you see either of them, please can you call that number? They’re both missing.’

‘Yeah. She’s my sister.’

It got harder and harder as the number of streets they covered crept up. The looks of sympathy were worse than the frustration of those bar staff who just turned away, or pubs where none of the staff would admit to being there on Sunday. As the spiel became more and more automatic, Amy kept imagining she saw Becky burst in through the door of one of the pubs, laughing and talking loudly with her hands as much as her voice …

In Old Compton Street, Amy was haunted by the memory of the Admiral Duncan bombing in 1999, imagining the horror of a huge deadly shower of nails, like thousands of bullets raining down on people drinking and relaxing after work … Was that guy regretting doing it, almost a quarter of a century on, as he languished forgotten in jail, serving out his six life sentences?

Did someone somewhere have regrets about killing Becky? Suddenly the street noises, the car horns and shouts, the music blaring from open windows all blended into a cacophonous sheet of white noise that made her want to curl up into a ball.

She stopped on the pavement and stared up at Gary.

‘I can’t do this any more. I’m starting to feel like I’m hallucinating, and every bar person who says they haven’t seen her is like a stab in the heart … Sorry, that sounds really melodramatic, but …’

She tailed off and turned away, her lip trembling like a toddler’s. Gary gave her a hug. ‘It’s OK. It’s hot and packed, and stressful. Let’s stop and have a drink. This place looks a bit quieter, come on.’

He took her hand and led her into a bar whose dark interior and lack of blaring music implied that it was the sort of place that didn’t come to life till a lot later. It was almost empty inside, just two Japanese girls at the bar in knee socks and kilts, sipping fruity cocktails and giggling.

‘Can I help you?’ The barman was polishing highball glasses. Amy and Gary sat down on stools at the opposite end of the bar to the girls. ‘Gin and tonic, please,’ said Amy, and Gary ordered a pint, at least half of which he drank in three gulps. Amy slid a Xerox of the photos of Katherine and Becky across the top of the bar.

‘I don’t suppose you recognize either of these girls, do you? This one might have been in here on Sunday.’

The barman scratched his facial hair, squinted through the gloom at it and then shook his head. ‘Nah, sorry. I’ll ask Geoff when he comes in, he was here on Sunday, too.’

‘Thanks. Please can you keep it and show it to the other staff as well?’

‘Sure.’

He put the Xerox under the bar, walked away and started cutting up lemons. Gary saw the expression on Amy’s face and squeezed her knee.

‘Did you try and talk to that Clive guy again?’

She nodded. ‘He doesn’t want to know. I’ve sent him messages on LinkedIn and Facebook, but he’s ignoring them. I don’t know his mobile number, and the venue wouldn’t tell me – I think he told them not to because they sounded shifty when I asked for it. I gave the promoter my number and asked him to pass it on – nothing. I don’t know what Becky did to Clive, but he’s not going to forgive her for it.’ She stared into her drink. ‘I’ve rarely seen such a look of hatred as the one on Clive’s face when I mentioned her.’

‘Hmm. Weird, isn’t it? Well, we’re doing all we can.’

‘Unlike the police.’

‘We’ve just got to keep on at them, Amy.’

She smiled faintly at the way he said ‘we’. ‘By the way,’ he added.

‘What?’

‘I like your skirt. Where did you get it – is it vintage? You look so cute.’

Her smile broadened a little more. There was something so ingenuous about Gary. She wondered fleetingly if he was gay – that wasn’t the sort of thing a macho guy would ask – but then she realized that he had just been trying to find something to say that might cheer her up. The skirt was black and full, with a pattern of cherries and daisies scattered across it, and she wore it with a thick red patent-leather belt, and a black vest top.