‘No,’ he replied. ‘He just said he wanted to look into it. I wondered why at the time, but not enough to get involved. We caught up, he asked for the file, and then I sent it to him. The arrangement we had back in Manchester was a two-way street, and he no longer had any column inches to give me, so I agreed to help him out for old times’ sake, and because it sounded like it was important to him, but I told him that was it. I couldn’t do it again. The other calls he made after that were all questions about the file – terminology, acronyms, that sort of thing. The file was put together in 1987, when the Steards girl first vanished, so some of the lingo we don’t use any more. It was mostly calls to clarify that – except for one, when he asked about a guy called …’

I heard the crisp snap of pages being turned.

‘Adrian Vale.’

I wrote the name next to Beatrix Steards.

‘Who was he?’ I asked.

‘He was the last man to see Steards alive. Perry asked if I could dig around and find out more about this Vale guy – aside from what was in Steards’s file – but I remember the search went nowhere because Vale died a long time ago – in 1989.’

‘Did Vale have a record?’

‘No, he was just a student, like her. Same university, same course.’

‘Do you know if Beatrix Steards has ever been found?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘And Patrick definitely never said why he was looking into her?’

‘I just told you, didn’t I?’ His voice was rising again, but I got the sense this time that his impatience wasn’t a reaction to me asking him questions, or even to the way he’d allowed himself to be manipulated, it was a reaction to his own, lingering feelings of guilt. He’d given Patrick exactly what he’d asked for, and had done it not thinking for a minute it would lead to this moment; to the possibility that, somewhere in the months between that first phone call and Halloween was the reason Patrick and eight others had disappeared. And it might have been the Steards case that acted as the trigger. It might have been the reason Patrick was heading out to the moors.

It might be why he’d lied about the camera.

Even so, I struggled to make any links. There had been no evidence of Beatrix Steards in Patrick’s Internet history, no evidence of her anywhere in his life. This had come completely out of left field. So why did she matter to him? Twenty-eight years after she went missing, and over three years after he left journalism, why would Patrick suddenly become interested in this case?

‘You got a DOB for Steards?’ I asked.

‘Fourth of March 1965.’

‘And where was she born?’

‘Hammersmith.’