He got it out, checked his texts and then pocketed his phone again, and after a final look at one of the last few photographs started coming towards me. I nipped up the stairs and out of sight, waiting for him to pass, and then came back down again to merge with the crowds behind him. He headed straight past the museum and the gift shop to the restaurant. This time, it was obvious that he was looking for someone – maybe the person who’d sent the text – his eyes switching from one table to the next.

I tried to see ahead of him, tried to imagine who was waiting for him.

He stopped at a table midway into the room.

There were four seats, three of them occupied, one by an attractive woman in her mid forties, the others by a girl of about fifteen and a boy of maybe ten or eleven.

The woman got up as soon as she saw Mills approaching and, when he reached the table, they exchanged a kiss on the cheek. He then said hello to the kids and they responded politely. They weren’t his, not only because I knew already he didn’t have any children, but because none of them – not Mills or the kids – hugged. The woman wasn’t his wife either, because he was divorced, but they were much more at ease.

They looked like a couple who’d just started dating.

He said something to the woman and then started speaking to the kids, rolling his eyes and pulling a face, and they responded in kind, smiling, the boy laughing a little. Mills was so different from the man I’d seen at Black Gale this morning – so warm, his face so expressive and mobile – I barely recognized him. When we’d spoken earlier, he’d hardly moved a muscle, his eyes fixed on me; here, he was the hero cop the media had reported on.

I stood there watching, unsure what to make of it all, as he appeared to ask the three of them what they wanted before heading across the room to the canteen. After he was gone, I watched the mother and her kids, watched how they reacted, waiting for them to look in Mills’s direction and say something about him. But if they did, it could only have been good: they all smiled and the mother made the boy laugh again.

I left the restaurant and headed outside to my car.

They parted company at the mill an hour later. I watched in my rear-view mirror as Mills kissed the woman on the cheek again and said goodbye to the kids, then, as they both left the car park in their vehicles, I let Mills go and fell into line behind the woman. She was heading in the opposite direction to Mills, towards Bradford.

On the outskirts of the city, she pulled into a petrol station.