‘The previous owners of the farm. Name of Sutton. Raymond is the brother now residing in a care home back in town – we don’t know which yet, but we’ll find out. He’s quite elderly, in his late seventies, we think. There was a younger brother, Derek, who died about a year ago.’

‘Not bad, Gavin.’

‘Thanks. Unfortunately, we can’t find any sign of anyone else in the household at that time, other than the two brothers. We’ve checked the electoral register, and they were the only two adults listed.’

‘So no women?’

‘No women,’ said Murfin. ‘Just peace and quiet.’

Inside the farmhouse, Cooper found the rooms to be a strange mixture of conversion and preservation. Passing from one room to another for the first time was an unpredictable experience. Some spaces were littered with building materials and tools left behind by Jamie Ward’s workmates. Sacks of sand and cement, piles of breeze block, buckets, a ladder, a couple of steel toolboxes. These rooms had been stripped of their original contents – all dumped in the yellow skip he’d seen outside the back door, presumably – and they’d been transformed into building sites instead.

Other rooms, though, had yet to be touched by anyone. Those still contained evidence of the farm’s occupants and their day-today existence – two pairs of wellington boots by the back door, a smelly overcoat still hanging in a cupboard under the stairs.

Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. It was difficult to tell which of them had been occupied most recently, since they were all equally full of junk and old clothes. The middle bedroom overlooked the yard, and it seemed darker and colder than the other two. If Cooper had been choosing a bedroom, it would have been any one but this.

The kitchen seemed to be the part of the house that was most intact. A black, cast-iron cooking range dominated one end of the room, and near it a tap still dripped in a Belfast sink, as if someone had only just failed to turn it off properly. All the furniture was still here, too – a large pine table with scarred and blackened legs, two ancient armchairs, a dresser filled with plates and cutlery.

In the corner and along the back wall, Cooper unearthed a number of less identifiable objects. He counted a dozen cardboard boxes, some standing on top of each other, the bottom one crumpling slightly under the weight. There was a heap of clothes on a chair near the cooking range and more coats and overalls hung behind the outer door. It was a Marie Celeste of a kitchen, frozen in time, preserved in the moment that the owners had finally walked out one day.