‘There’s something about it,’ he said, looking at her in the eyes now, suddenly focused and serious, despite the tears. ‘This case, I mean. There’s something about it. After thirty years, you get a sense for these things, and this’ – he gestured to the file – ‘it’s giving off all the wrong vibes. So it’ll need someone strong and relentless to work it, someone who can give it the time it needs. It’ll need someone like you. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s this: the person who forced Klein to help him, the person who really came up with the plan to dump that body in a tub full of acid, is still out there somewhere – and whoever they are, they’re really fucking dangerous.’

27

Pulling the Audi into the near-empty car park of the motorway hotel, I switched off the engine and peered through the doors into reception. I thought about Isaac Mills, about the possibility that he’d already been here, using the audio recordings of Healy and me as a springboard for finding out where we were staying. In my head, on the drive over from Keighley, I built a picture of him tearing the paperwork off the wall of the room.

But then it began to blur.

And, as it did, I pictured the photograph of him, in the days after he’d stopped an armed robbery, and I saw him at the mill with the family, and replayed the words of the woman he was dating, and the image I had of him reduced to a shadow.

All I was left with then was what I knew for sure: Patrick Perry had called an old source at the Met in London and asked him for information on a missing student.

Beatrix Steards.

Getting out of the car, I headed up to the room. An intense flood of relief hit me when I found everything we’d collated – all the paperwork, the cuttings, the notes – exactly as we’d left them.

As quickly as possible, I began packing it all up, until I was left with just the photograph of the villagers at the Gibbses’ dinner table. I held it in my hands for a second, pinched between my fingers, my eyes moving between the nine villagers, their clothes as ingrained in my head as the expression on their faces. Freda’s floral dress. Emiline’s red-and-blue one. Chris’s checked shirt. Patrick’s green V-neck sweater. Randolph’s dark brown cords.

Where are you all?

I dropped the photo into the box, on top of everything else, and headed back out to the car, loading it all into the boot. Once I was done, I paid the bill for both rooms and then nosed out of the services and on to the motorway.

This time, I drove east.