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Avenue.
    ‘I’m sorry, Laura, Mike,’ Kate began. Using their first names was standard police practice, to engender familiarity and openness. It felt clinical in the face of their tragedy to follow textbook procedure, but that rigidity was essential if Kate was to do her job properly. ‘I know you’ve just had a great shock, but we need your help.’
    Kate was trying to distract them as much as anything.
    Yet all three of them would be thinking the same thing. The reality, the awful truth.
    Ruby Day had not disappeared; someone had taken her.
    ‘Do you recognise the location in the video clip? Is there a rural place you have ever been to? Can you think of anyone that might want to do this to Ruby?’ said Kate.
    They shook their heads.
    ‘What about your work, Mr Day? Anything that might lead to something like this?’
    ‘I manage projects for the government.’
    ‘Anything sensitive?’
    ‘What? No. Projects for the NHS, nothing like that.’
    ‘Anything in your own personal history? Anyone who might hold a grudge?’
    Kate thought of Ruby’s two million subscribers and about what Harris had said about the sicko out there watching Ruby. Had someone got tired of watching her from the privacy of their home, and found out where she lived? Turned their fantasies, in which Ruby spoke to them through her videos, into something else?
    Kate was familiar with cases like that. She had studied the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the uncategorised, at Brown University. She knew how sometimes it could be a passing encounter in the street that sparked something. The colour of someone’s hair, eyes, the shape of their mouth, the way they walked, what they wore. One man she had hunted had stalked women based on their footwear, and what it reminded him of.
    And from that transient second, that initial spark, that innocent person became the centre of someone’s universe, and they had no idea. No idea until it was too late, until someone else was mining their body, mining their life. With Kate trying to figure out why and how and who. All the time knowing that the victim was arbitrary. A hieroglyph that someone had interpreted.
    Is that what had happened to Ruby? Had someone interpreted her, projected their own fantasies onto her, made her into something else? Was Ruby chosen because she reminded her kidnapper of someone else? Or had she been chosen for her own sake?
    Kate wanted to mine Ruby’s life, before she was stripped of it. On the video, Ruby was still alive, and she wanted to find her before that changed. Stop her becoming an object, a mere body that was worked on for clues.
    Laura stroked Mike’s arm; it was a comforting gesture, although it might have been a signal.
    ‘Your colleague, Detective Sergeant Harris, he kept asking us why we were so worried when Ruby didn’t come home,’ said Mike. ‘We said it’s natural concern, and he looked at us oddly. I knew what was going through his mind: Ruby is a grown woman, why were we panicking so much. It’s just that Ruby is different from other women her age – she wouldn’t have just gone off. That’s who she is – no trouble, sensitive to our feelings. She wouldn’t make us worry unnecessarily.’
    ‘Of course, and as it turns out, you were absolutely right to be worried.’
    ‘Yes. And last night that’s all it was. Parental worry. We assumed something had happened to her. An accident, or she was in a situation where she needed help. We didn’t think it could be something like this . . . not really. But now, the video, seeing that . . . someone has her, and this changes everything. Now it makes sense in a way that is terrifying for us.’
    ‘You have my complete support, Mike, we will do everything to find her.’
    ‘No what I mean is, we think we know who might have taken her,’ said Mike.

Chapter Ten
    Mike looked embarrassed, unable to meet Kate’s eyes.
    ‘We think it’s her boyfriend, Daniel Grant,’ he said.
    ‘That’s a pretty serious