The police had only searched as far back as a fortnight.

I googled the number, but it failed to provide me with anything coherent, just a clump of sites where people could log cold-callers and scam artists in an effort to help others avoid them. The London landline that was listed in Patrick’s phone records didn’t match any number recorded as a nuisance call, and it didn’t tally with any bona fide company listed in the search results further down. That meant it was probably for a home or a work extension. I punched in the number and pressed Dial.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting.

But it hadn’t been this.

‘This is Detective Inspector Kevin Quinn. I’m afraid that I can’t get to the phone at the moment – but if you leave your details, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.’

23

Confused, I hung up without leaving a message.

Patrick had been calling the police.

And the police had been calling him.

Going back to Google, I went looking for Detective Inspector Kevin Quinn and found brief mentions of him in a number of media stories dealing with investigations in London. A murder. An assault. A robbery at a jewellery store in Hatton Garden. I read through each of them, but while they were dealing with serious crimes, they seemed relatively unambiguous and I couldn’t see a link to Black Gale.

I began tapping out a rhythm on the edge of the laptop, trying to imagine how or why Patrick would have contacted a cop in London and if it was actually relevant to my search. Even if it wasn’t, it was odd, an irregularity I didn’t like: he’d never lived there in his life, and had spent his entire career in Manchester and the north-west.

Returning to the document, I wrote down the duration of each of the eleven calls between Patrick and Kevin Quinn, trying to spot a pattern. The first call had been the sixteen-minute one, and that was the longest. The others varied in length, some lasting as little as fifty-two seconds and as long as eleven minutes. When I switched to the dates the calls were made, they were haphazard too: they started on Wednesday 2 September, nearly two months before Halloween, and continued at apparently random intervals over the course of the next five weeks. The last contact between Patrick and Quinn was on Friday 9 October at 9 p.m.

Where had this relationship come from?

Had I missed something in my background check on Patrick?