‘Right. So she was even further away than me.’ Ross looked out at the moors; a storm was coming towards us, the clouds pregnant with it. ‘She said she’d tried calling my parents on their home number, then the Gibbses, then Randolph and Emiline, but couldn’t get through to any of them, so she asked if I could speak to Mum and Dad – maybe try their mobiles – and see if they could check in on her folks. That was when I said to her, “I can’t get hold of my parents either.” I started to panic. We both did.’

‘So then you headed up here?’

He nodded. ‘The moment I got here, I knew something wasn’t right. It was so quiet. Normally, Chris and Laura were out on the farm: Chris would be repairing machinery, or be working on the tractor, or in the sheds. Mark would be there too, a lot of the time. He was nineteen, at agricultural college, but whenever he wasn’t down in Bradford he was helping his parents out.’ He stopped, pointing to the house next to his mum and dad’s. ‘Emiline, she was always outside as well. Loved her garden; would be out there rain or shine. But that day there was no one around. The houses were all locked up. It was dead.’

I stayed silent, looking out at the moors.

The police had done three separate searches of the surrounding area in the weeks following the disappearances – the second and third time with cadaver dogs – and had found nothing. No bodies, no clothing, nothing belonging to any of the nine missing Black Gale residents. Two months in, they took a helicopter out, with cameras capable of revealing recently disturbed earth – and, in turn, potential grave sites – but that came up short too. Before that, they’d found no unidentified tyre tracks in the surface mud on the road in and out of the village, and therefore no evidence that any vehicles – other than Ross’s, and the ones belonging to the villagers – had driven up here on the date of the disappearance, or the days that followed. CCTV coverage was virtually non-existent this far out and there were no witnesses to anything suspicious in the villages that circled Black Gale. The police concluded that the last physical contact anyone had had with the village was when a postman delivered mail to the Daveys and the Gibbs on Saturday 31 October.

Or, at least, that was the last contact they knew about.