Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost “As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. “It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in her hand and a toy monkey sticking out of her bag.” When I was in Birmingham earlier this year, I met Catherine O’Flynn, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 for What Was Lost. The girl with the monkey is Kate Meaney, a bright, solitary child with a taste for mysteries and detection. She disappeared two decades ago but her image seems to appear on the monitor screens that security guard Kurt spends his nights watching in the Green Oaks shopping centre. Green Oaks itself is fictional, but draws both on Catherine’s own previous experience working in a record store (which she deploys to wonderful comic effect in the book) and …