A rented property forty miles south-east, off a farm road, taken on a six-month lease in the September by a company that turned out to be one of Fernando’s, and which had been paid in full in advance and had never once been visited by the letting agent.

State troopers went in at 6:11 and Maya Beltran was in that house and she was alive.

She was dehydrated and she was underweight and she had been sedated, and she spent nineteen days in hospital, and she is fine now in every way that can be measured and there are some ways that cannot be.

She was taken to make her father stop.

That is the whole of the motive and it is not complicated and it is, I have since learned, a much more common category of abduction than anybody outside law enforcement believes.