‘I tried them again in the evening and then again the following morning. Nothing. I’m not sure that I was worried by that point …’ His voice trailed off, his gaze fixed on a space beyond me. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I was. It wasn’t like we talked every day. It’s just, after you send someone two or three texts and you leave them a few messages, you do start to wonder.’ His eyes strayed back towards me. ‘I live south of Leeds, so it’s a seventy-mile drive up here. It wasn’t like I could just pop round to see if they were all right. It was a Monday, the branch was open, so I had clients and viewings. I would have been busy.’

He said it like it was a decision anyone could understand him making, but his voice betrayed him. He’d spent every day of the last two and a half years wishing he’d reacted faster, because driving seventy miles was nothing when you were doing it for the people you loved. Would it have made a difference if he’d dropped everything and come here on Monday 2 November? Or, as the police suspected, were the Perrys and the rest of the families in Black Gale long gone by that time? The not knowing was the problem. It was the prickle in his skin, the irritant.

‘So when did you finally come up here?’

‘When Rina Blake called me on Tuesday the 3rd.’

I flipped back to some details I’d logged the night before, at home in London as I’d gone over Internet accounts of the Black Gale disappearances. Chris and Laura Gibbs, and their teenaged son Mark, were the family who’d lived at the farm. Patrick and Francesca Perry I already knew about. In the house next to theirs had been seventy-year-old Randolph Solomon and his sixty-four-year-old girlfriend Emiline Wilson. And then, finally, in the last house, was a retired couple called John and Freda Davey. He was sixty-eight, she was sixty-five, and Rina Blake was their daughter.

‘How did you know Rina?’ I asked.

‘We’d met a few times when we’d both been up here visiting our parents. She knew I ran my own estate agency in Leeds, so she knew where to find me. She called me and said she’d been trying to get hold of her mum and dad and neither of them had responded. She and Freda were in touch every day – literally, every day. She said her mum would often just call to ask how Rina’s day was going. I think she could be a bit of a mother-hen type sometimes, but Rina said she never minded. She said Freda had been a great mum.’

‘Rina lives in Cambridge, right?’