The Smuggler’s Daughter. Kerry Barrett

said. ‘That girl would be on the streets if it wasn’t for him.’

      I thanked him for his time, and hung up the phone, shouting for Stacey as I pulled on my coat. We had to go and see the parents again.

      From there on, it all unravelled. It turned out, Steve was more than just strict. He regularly punished poor Ciara for any perceived misdemeanour, from not stacking the dishwasher properly, to a poor mark on a test. And the messages from her new friend had tipped him over into disgust.

      ‘She was messaging some filthy little turd,’ he hissed at Stacey and me, his lip curled. ‘I check her phone, of course, and she didn’t even try to hide it.’

      I thought about how innocent the messages were, and how I’d been mildly surprised by their chaste tone, and winced. ‘What did you do then?’

      He lifted his chin up, looking pleased with himself. ‘I said to Molly that she needed to be punished and Molly agreed.’

      Molly, sitting next to him, looked alarmed. ‘We hadn’t agreed on that,’ she said. ‘I felt a bit of a hypocrite. I had boyfriends at her age.’

      ‘And look where you ended up,’ Steve spat at her. ‘Pregnant.’

      Molly stayed quiet after that, as Steve explained how he wanted to teach Ciara a lesson, so he’d taken her to his allotment on Saturday afternoon and left her in the shed.

      ‘It’s freezing,’ Stacey said. ‘And her coat is still here. She must have been so cold.’

      The thought of poor Ciara in the icy shed made me shiver. I shook my head. ‘But we searched the shed,’ I said. ‘And the allotments. She’s not there.’

      ‘I just wanted to give her a scare,’ Steve said. ‘But when I got back to the allotment after church, she wasn’t there.’ He shrugged, not looking remotely worried. ‘She’ll be with that lad,’ he said. ‘Getting up to all sorts.’

      ‘She’s not with him.’ My voice was cold. ‘They never met up.’

      Molly gave a little gasp and he patted her hand. ‘She’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘They’ll find her.’

      We did find her. In the woods, behind the patch of allotments, that skirted the railway line. She’d obviously found her way out of the shed, but in confusion from the cold, she’d curled herself into the roots of a tree, gone to sleep and never woken up. The freezing February weather, and the vest top and thin leggings she’d been wearing made sure of that.

      ‘She wouldn’t have suffered,’ the pathologist reassured me.

      But I kept thinking about how scared she must have been, and how cold, and how if I’d followed my instincts right at the start, we might have found her sooner.

      ‘It’s not your fault,’ DI Blair said over and over, as we watched Steve being put into a police car and Ciara’s mother wailing from inside the house. ‘The only person to blame, is that bugger. This is not your fault.’

      But somehow I felt that it was.