25

The rain eased off for a moment, the wind dying. I glanced up the road to Isaac Mills’s house, checking no one was watching me, and then dug out my notebook and a pen.

‘Beatrix Steards is a missing person?’

‘Like I just told you,’ Quinn replied sharply.

‘When did she disappear?’

‘1987.’

Thirty-one years ago.

‘Do you know how?’

‘She was at some house party in Lambeth.’

‘Lambeth in London?’

‘Do you know any other Lambeths?’

He made it sound like a stupid question, but it wasn’t: why would Patrick be looking into the disappearance of a woman in a city that he’d never worked or lived in?

Why would he be looking into a disappearance at all?

‘So she was at university in London as well, then?’

‘Yeah,’ he responded gruffly. ‘King’s College, it says here. She was at a house party in March 1987, left about 11.45 p.m., and that was the last time anyone saw her.’

I tried to clear my head. At the time he went missing, Patrick hadn’t worked as a journalist or freelancer for over three years, had shown no signs of ever wanting to go back, and in fact was riding high on the success of his PR firm. Not only was the growth of his company taking up his entire working life, financially its rewards far outweighed any writing work he might have been – for whatever reason – hoping to pitch. So, whatever it was he saw in the story of Beatrix Steards, it couldn’t have been commercial, and it was even harder to imagine that he was doing it in order to get back into journalism. Off the back of that, I remembered an interview Ross had given to the police where he recollected a conversation he’d had with his father only weeks before Halloween. I didn’t recall it verbatim, but I remembered enough: Patrick had told Ross that setting up the PR business was the best decision he’d ever made.

So why the sudden interest in Beatrix Steards?

‘Did he say why he wanted her file?’ I asked Quinn.