I’d already called ahead and paid for two nights in a holiday cottage on a farm south of York, and once I found it, I unloaded everything again, chatted politely to the owner of the cottage, and then began the process of sticking everything on to the wall of the living room.

Half an hour later, Black Gale filled every inch of it.

I took a moment to make myself a coffee and then returned to the wall again, to the reminders of the course Healy and I had been trying to plot, and to Beatrix Steards’s name, which I’d now added. Seconds later, my phone started ringing, shattering the quiet of the cottage. I grabbed it, looking at the display.

It was a Leeds area code.

‘It’s me,’ Healy said as soon as I answered, almost shouting the words, his voice swamped by the sound of passing traffic. He must have been at a phone box on a main road.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Yeah, fine. Managed to find a place just outside the city centre with a bed like concrete. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what we found at the house,’ he said, changing the subject instantly, trying to retain his connection to our search, ‘and about Randolph Solomon. He’s the only one with a proven connection to this Seiger and Sten, right? Randolph was using them to handle his legal affairs. Then this Isaac Mills, he works for Seiger and Sten – so what if Randolph and Mills knew each other? Or what about if it’s worse? What about if they were working together?’

‘What, you think Randolph is behind all of this?’

‘I know you’ve been thinking the same thing.’

It was true, I’d considered it – not least because of the missing camper van – but, according to Ross, Randolph’s connection to Seiger and Sten was simple enough to follow: he’d lived in York before Black Gale – although I still needed to confirm that – and he’d then used the company to wind up his father’s estate in the seventies, and for other legal issues in the time since, including his and Emiline’s move out to the Dales. But the longer I went without being able to disprove Randolph’s involvement, the longer suspicion would linger, so, for now, I decided to focus on what I knew for sure, and what I could control: Patrick Perry, the lies he’d told Laura Gibbs about his camera, his moorland walks, and his search for a student who’d been missing for thirty-one years.

I gave Healy a quick overview of everything he’d missed.

‘Shit,’ he said quietly. ‘You got any idea who this Beatrix Steards girl is?’

‘Only what I’ve read online. I’m waiting on her file.’

‘And Isaac Mills? Do we know anything else about him?’

‘Only that he’s an ex-cop and he says he works for Seiger and Sten.’