The missing persons file for Beatrix Steards looked every day of its thirty-one years, the scanned pages in the digital version duplicating the flaws of the paper original exactly: its tears, its marks, the way the typewriter produced imperfect letters – some black and crisp; others soft, undefined or barely there at all. The overriding poverty of the search was much easier to see, though: there were few clues, even fewer leads, and the whole case had begun stalling about two weeks after Beatrix vanished. It was hard to say if that was down to a lack of focus, a lack of care or a lack of ability – it may even have been a combination of all three – but it was there on the page, stark and undeniable, the last update of any significance added in October 1989.

The lead investigator was a DS called Stuart Smoulter, who – after a couple of phone calls – I discovered had died of a stroke in 2009, aged sixty-nine, which meant there was no way of mining his memories of the case. His work was solid, mechanical, a series of ticked boxes that had ultimately resulted in minimal forward movement. I was, though, able to confirm some of the details that Kevin Quinn had already provided me with: Beatrix Steards had been twenty-one at the time of her disappearance, she’d got a first in History at King’s College and had then stayed on to do a Politics postgrad in September 1986, and the night she went missing – 3 March 1987, the day before her birthday – she’d been at a house party in Lambeth. The last person to see her alive was a 22-year-old man called Adrian Vale, who Quinn had told me about over the phone, and who Patrick Perry had asked him about as well: in the middle of the file was an interview that Smoulter had conducted with Vale. I gave it a quick look but decided to leave a detailed read until the end, concentrating instead on trying to fill in as much of the background on Beatrix Steards as possible.

Smoulter didn’t offer much on her childhood, but I managed to fill the gaps I had using a combination of what he’d found out and what was written in the one article about Beatrix I’d discovered online. She was born in Hammersmith on 4 March 1965, had lived in Fulham and then further out in Woking, and although her parents, Dave and Mira Steards, weren’t around any more – they were killed in a car accident in 1990 – she had had, by all accounts, a happy, settled upbringing. In terms of geography, the details also seemed to tally: Beatrix had never been based anywhere except the south; certainly never in the north-west, where Patrick Perry lived. The two of them were around the same age at the time of Beatrix’s disappearance, but they’d lived out their lives in separate cities, two hundred miles apart.