The document ran to 102 pages and was divided into nine sections. I kept my pad next to me, and a pen, and methodically worked through it all, looking for anomalies – numbers that didn’t fit, activity that didn’t make sense, red flags, unexplained calls, irregular numbers, anything. Spike had done me a big favour by listing the name of the person who had received or made the call from or to the individual Black Gale resident, or at least who the phone number was registered to. Sometimes the name listed was only a business. Sometimes the number was for a helpline at a huge company that bore no relevance to the case. Even so, they helped me to dismiss a lot of the calls that had been made out of and into the nine mobile phones, as well as the landlines at all four of the homes. It was slow work. There were so many calls listed in the document that I had to work hard to stay focused – one line blurring into the next – as I went through all nine itemized bills.

In the end, it took me almost ninety minutes, but once I finished I had a list on my notepad of thirteen numbers that either didn’t tally up or felt anomalous.

Again, I worked through them in the same way, cross-checking them against the other numbers in the document that Spike had sent me, as well as against a long list of names I’d already compiled of friends and relatives that the residents had had.

By the time I was done, I’d whittled it down to one.

I’d found the number buried among almost nine hundred calls that one of the villagers had made. It was repeated eleven times: nine calls from the villager to the number, and two calls from the number to the villager.

The number had a central London area code.

The villager was Patrick Perry.

As I looked at the PDF, I thought about Patrick going out on to the moors, the broken camera he pretended was working, the idea he was having an affair.

And now there was this.

I spent a moment double-checking, just to make sure, but the London number didn’t tally with the numbers of any existing contacts of his that I knew about, and anyway, as far as I could tell, Patrick had done almost no work in the capital during either of his careers. His PR clients were mostly based in Manchester and Liverpool, with a couple in Birmingham, and while he did do some PR work on a DVD release for a small independent film company in Soho, the number for them wasn’t a match. There was something else too, the reason that the police hadn’t picked up on this: the conversations between Patrick and the number – one of them lasting over sixteen minutes – had stopped three weeks before the Black Gale disappearances.