“I asked Dad and Cyn where my mother’s parents were. They said they were dead. That turned out to be true. My grandfather died of a heart attack a couple of years after my mother disappeared and my grandmother died of a stroke a year later. My mother was an only child, so there were no other relatives I could meet or talk to about her.

“I asked for photographs. My father said he’d got rid of them all, but Cyn dug some out for me, a couple of weeks after I found out. She asked me not to tell my father she’d done it; to hide them. I did: I had a pajama case shaped like a rabbit and I kept my mother’s photographs in there for years.”

“Did your father and stepmother explain to you what might have happened to your mother?” Strike asked.

“Dennis Creed, you mean?” said Anna. “Yes, but they didn’t tell me details. They said there was a chance she’d been killed by a—by a bad man. They had to tell me that much, because of what the boy at school had said.

“It was an appalling idea, thinking she might have been killed by Creed—I found out his name soon enough, kids at school were happy to fill me in. I started having nightmares about her, headless. Sometimes she came into my bedroom at night. Sometimes I dreamed I found her head in my toy chest.

“I got really angry with my father and Cyn,” said Anna, twisting her fingers together. “Angry that they’d never told me, obviously, but I also started wondering what else they were hiding, whether they were involved in my mother disappearing, whether they’d wanted her out of the way, so they could marry. I went a bit off the rails, started playing truant… one weekend I took off and was brought home by the police. My father was livid. Of course, I look back, and after what had happened to my mother… obviously, me going missing, even for a few hours…

“I gave them hell, to tell you the truth,” said Anna shamefacedly. “But all credit to Cyn, she stuck by me. She never gave up. She and Dad had had kids together by then—I’ve got a younger brother and sister—and there was family therapy and holidays with bonding activities, all led by Cyn, because my father certainly didn’t want to do it. The subject of my mother just makes him angry and aggrieved. I remember him yelling at me, didn’t I realize how terrible it was for him to have it all dragged up again, how did I think he felt…

“When I was fifteen I tried to find my mother’s friend, Oonagh, the one she was supposed to be meeting the night she disappeared. They were Bunny Girls together,” said Anna, with a little smile, “but I didn’t know that at the time. I tracked Oonagh down in Wolverhampton, and she was quite emotional to hear from me. We had a couple of lovely phone calls. She told me things I really wanted to know, about my mother’s sense of humor, the perfume she wore—Rive Gauche, I went out and blew my birthday money on a bottle next day—how she was addicted to chocolate and was an obsessive Joni Mitchell fan. My mother came more alive to me when I was talking to Oonagh than through the photographs, or anything Dad or Cyn had told me.

“But my father found out I’d spoken to Oonagh and he was furious. He made me give him Oonagh’s number and called her and accused her of encouraging me to defy him, told her I was troubled, in therapy and what I didn’t need was people ‘stirring.’ He told me not to wear the Rive Gauche, either. He said he couldn’t stand the smell of it.

“So I never did meet Oonagh, and when I tried to reconnect with her in my twenties, I couldn’t find her. She might have passed away, for all I know.”

“I got into university, left home and started reading everything I could about Dennis Creed. The nightmares came back, but it didn’t get me any closer to finding out what really happened.

“Apparently the man in charge of the investigation into my mother’s disappearance, a detective inspector called Bill Talbot, always thought Creed took her. Talbot will be dead by now; he was coming up for retirement anyway.

“Then, a few years out of uni, I had the bright idea of starting a website,” said Anna. “My girlfriend at the time was tech-savvy. She helped me set it up. I was very naive,” she sighed. “I said who I was and begged for information about my mother.

“You can probably imagine what happened. All kinds of theories: psychics telling me where to dig, people telling me my father had obviously done it, others telling me I wasn’t really Margot’s daughter, that I was after money and publicity, and some really malicious messages as well, saying my mother had probably run off with a lover and worse. A couple of journalists got in touch, too. One of them ran an awful piece in the Daily Express about our family: they contacted my father and that was just about the final nail in the coffin for our relationship.

“It’s never really recovered,” said Anna bleakly. “When I told him I’m gay, he seemed to think I was only doing it to spite him. And Cyn’s gone over to his side a bit, these last few years. She always says, ‘I’ve got a loyalty to your dad, too, Anna.’ So,” said Anna, “that’s where we are.”

There was a brief silence.

“Dreadful for you,” said Robin.

“It is,” agreed Kim, placing her hand on Anna’s knee again, “and I’m wholly sympathetic to Anna’s desire for resolution, of course I am. But is it realistic,” she said, looking from Robin to Strike, “and I mean this with no offense to you two, to think that you’ll achieve what the police haven’t, after all this time?”

“Realistic?” said Strike. “No.”

Robin noticed Anna’s downward look and the sudden rush of tears into her large eyes. She felt desperately sorry for the older woman, but at the same time she respected Strike’s honesty, and it seemed to have impressed the skeptical Kim, too.

“Here’s the truth,” Strike said, tactfully looking at his notes until Anna had finished drying her eyes with the back of her hand. “I think we’d have a reasonable chance of getting hold of the old police file, because we’ve got decent contacts at the Met. We can sift right through the evidence again, revisit witnesses as far as that’s possible, basically make sure every stone’s been turned over twice.

“But it’s odds on that after all this time, we wouldn’t find any more than the police did, and we’d be facing two major obstacles.

“Firstly, zero forensic evidence. From what I understand, literally no trace of your mother was ever found, is that right? No items of clothing, bus pass—nothing.”

“True,” mumbled Anna.

“Secondly, as you’ve just pointed out, a lot of the people connected with her or who witnessed anything that night are likely to have died.”

“I know,” said Anna, and a tear trickled, sparkling, down her nose onto the Perspex table. Kim reached out and put an arm around her shoulders. “Maybe it’s turning forty,” said Anna, with a sob, “but I can’t stand the idea that I’ll go to my grave never knowing what happened.”

“I understand that,” said Strike, “but I don’t want to promise what I’m unlikely to be able to deliver.”

“Have there,” asked Robin, “been any new leads or developments over the years?”

Kim answered. She seemed a little shaken by Anna’s naked distress, and kept her arm around her shoulders.