The following morning, Alex and Chloe managed to catch up with Jade Richards, the girl who had been with Amy Barker at the nightclub on Monday evening. Jade hadn’t been home since then, although her father hadn’t seemed particularly unsettled by his daughter’s absence. It didn’t take long to determine that he was used to her independent ways. If anything, he seemed relieved to have her out of the way.

‘You’d better stand either end of the hall,’ he suggested, heading for the foot of the stairs. ‘If she sees you here, she’ll do another runner.’

Chloe shot Alex a look. She didn’t fancy another sprint session in pursuit of the girl. Being with Scott had done wonders for her happiness but very little for her fitness levels. She was eating too much good food and staying too long in one place, something she was unused to. At the rate she was going, none of her clothes would fit her by Christmas. The irony of Scott being a trainee fitness instructor hadn’t escaped her.

Alex gave her a nod, silently recommending she take the front door. She herself went down the hallway to the kitchen and waited impatiently, glancing behind her at the clock on the far wall.

‘Dad!’ There were a few thumps from upstairs, a couple of expletives, then the sound of footsteps padding reluctantly across the landing. Jade’s father followed her as she started down the stairs, presumably satisfied that they now had her well and truly cornered.

Both Alex and Chloe had considered the possibility that Jade’s disappearing act at the hospital had been an indication that she might have been guilty of supplying the drugs to her friend herself, but the more Alex thought about it, the more implausible it seemed. The girl was only fifteen, and although fifteen was old enough to get up to all sorts, she just didn’t believe that this particular fifteen-year-old was capable of it. Would she really have been able to visit Amy in the hospital – to see her in that way, comatose and hooked up to all those machines – if she had been the one responsible for putting her there?

And even if she had provided the drugs, someone was responsible for dealing to her. Alex hoped the chain of suppliers wasn’t going to prove too long.

‘Dad!’ the girl shouted again, louder this time, when she saw Chloe standing at the front door. She made a strange noise, the dejected howl of a caged animal, before continuing reluctantly down the stairs, knowing this time that there was no escape.

‘Why did you run from me at the hospital yesterday, Jade?’

Chloe followed the girl into the living room. Jade threw herself onto the sofa and folded her arms across her chest with such aggression that she almost managed to hit herself in the face.

‘Jade,’ her father said, in what Alex imagined was intended to be a warning tone. It was pretty ineffectual. His daughter simply shot him a look that said she wished he’d go away and leave them to it. Her father responded with a look that spoke a similar message.

‘You’re not in any trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ Alex said.

The girl turned her head and rolled her eyes. It was times such as this that occasionally reassured Alex – if only for the briefest of moments – that not having children needn’t necessarily be regarded as a personal tragedy. Teenagers seemed to exist as a whole species of their own: rude, ungrateful, insolent. Maybe she’d been spared.

Yet even in the face of Jade Richards’ angst, she still doubted it. She felt a knot twist in her stomach, tight and familiar, and tried to empty her mind in an attempt to be freed from it.

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘You were there, Jade,’ Alex reminded her. ‘Of course you do.’

This time, the girl didn’t look at her. She leaned forward on the sofa and moved her arms from her chest, resting her elbows on her knees and covering her face with her hands, as though she was boiling up inside with anger.

But then they heard the sound of stifled sobs. Alex sat on the sofa, at the opposite end to Jade, where she could keep a cautious distance and avoid the risk of scaring her off once again. ‘We’re not interested in blaming anyone … no one except the person who supplied Amy with those drugs. Do you know who it was, Jade?’

Behind her hands, Jade shook her head.

‘Amy’s very unwell, you know that. If anything happens to her, someone is responsible. Someone’s already responsible. I know you care about your friend – you wouldn’t have been at the hospital yesterday if you didn’t. Just think about what happens if another person takes what Amy took. No one deserves what’s happened to her. You don’t want that, do you?’

Alex glanced at Chloe, hopeful that they were about to break through the girl’s barriers. Maybe Jade wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe most teenagers weren’t. She remembered herself at the same age. There had been times she had been angry at the world without really knowing why, despite the fact that she had come from a comfortable home and had a steady, relatively uneventful upbringing. Perhaps it was just a by-product of growing up.

‘I don’t know who he was,’ the girl said eventually. ‘I’ve never seen him before. He came up to us outside when we were in the queue. Amy was flirting with him.’ She glanced awkwardly at her father, enough of a look for Alex to decipher that it was perhaps Jade and not Amy who had been doing the flirting.

‘Did he give you the drugs when you were outside?’

Jade shook her head. ‘Not in the queue, no.’ She looked up at Alex; for the first time, the confrontational defiance was lost from her face. ‘He mentioned them, but there were too many people about. Amy went back outside later to get them. I was supposed to take it first. I agreed to do it if she went out to get them. I thought it would be a laugh.’ The girl’s voice began to break. ‘But I didn’t swallow mine – I put it under my tongue and spat it out when she wasn’t looking. A few minutes later, she was on the floor.’ She had started crying fully now, this time not bothering to attempt to hide her tears.

Alex looked up at Jade’s father. He was red in the face, either a display of embarrassment at his daughter’s admission or a flush of anger that she had been so naïve. Probably both, she imagined.

‘You said she went outside,’ Chloe said, ‘yet he didn’t sell them to you in the queue when you were waiting to go in. So where was outside, Jade?’

‘By the toilets,’ she told her. ‘There’s a fire exit at the back of the club – it leads out on to this, like, yard bit where you can go for a smoke or whatever. One of the boys from school scored there last week – he told us that if you go there, you can usually find someone selling.’

Chloe shot Alex a look. Their thoughts were mirrored: these drugs had been targeted at teenagers, part of the sudden influx of party smarties being distributed at Cardiff’s under-18 club nights. They had found their way out of the city and were heading further up the valleys, having now made their way to Pontypridd. So who was responsible for bringing them there?

‘How old was he?’ Alex asked. ‘Same age as you? Older?’

‘A bit older,’ Jade said through snivels. ‘Probably not much, though. Late teens, twenties … I don’t know.’

‘OK,’ Alex said. ‘We’re going to need a full description – do you think you can do that for us?’

Jade glanced at her father, who was still standing in the doorway, still looking at his daughter as though he wanted to wipe the floor with her as soon as the detectives left. She nodded reluctantly. ‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Yeah, I’ll give you a description.’