I would like to thank my agent, the brilliant Sophie Lambert, for believing in The Missing Girl from the start. She gave me the confidence to think that success was in my grasp and her creative input, guidance and advice has been invaluable.
Thank you also to the team at C & W, and especially to Jake Smith-Bosanquet for his skill in foreign rights, and to Emma Finn for all her support. Many thanks go to Carrie Plitt for ensuring the book has the perfect home in audio.
I am incredibly grateful to Sam Humphreys for her superb editing and insightful advice on how to make this novel stronger. I knew from our first meeting that I wanted to work with Sam. Huge thanks to Josie Humber, Laura Carr, Katie James and the rest of the team at Mantle who helped create this book, and thank you to Emma Draude and Frances Gough for their fantastic support with publicity. I’m immensely proud to be published by Pan Macmillan.
I am indebted to all my Curtis Brown Creative classmates for their friendly and honest feedback; to Rufus Purdy and especially to Anna Davis whose perceptive comments sent me down a better path. I am grateful also to the talented Erin Kelly, for her wonderful teaching on the course and all her excellent and good-humoured advice on being a writer since then.
Thanks to writer Morag Joss for her brilliant workshops as Creative Writing Fellow at Reading University. I still take heed of her nuggets of advice. To Alex Birtles, Jan Dacre, Caz Frear, Helen Hathaway and Maddy Read-Clarke – thank you so much for taking the time to read early drafts and for giving me such a great response. To Russ Aitkins for his ideas and suggestions relating to police procedure back in the 1980s. Any mistakes are most definitely my own. And to Jack Rogers who gave me ideas about legal procedure. Apologies if I went off track.
Thank you to all my family and friends who have supported me along the path to publication, and especially to my wonderful friend and early champion, Jenny Noël who passed away before this book was published.
All my love and gratitude goes to my beautiful children: Stephen, Amelia and Olivia, who have spent so many years putting up with overcooked dinners and a distracted mother who’s always in a different world.
Thank you to my lovely, patient husband, Derick, who has rescued those overcooked dinners, made me endless cups of tea and never lost faith in my ability to achieve my dream.
And finally, I would like to remember my parents, who patiently read my early attempts at detective stories, who supplied me with shelves full of books, who took me on endless trips to libraries and who never had any doubt that, one day, my dream of being a writer would come true. I miss you still. This book is for you.