On the police database, there would have been the option to view the photos in a higher resolution, but I’d had to make do with the low-res printouts I’d been given. They’d be good enough for now, though. Even pixellated, they backed up exactly what Ross was saying about the Halloween dinner: the four couples – and Mark Gibbs too, who appeared in a number of the shots – had all been having a good time.

‘They all had Halloween masks,’ Ross said. ‘In one of the pictures, I think Chris must have set his phone on a timer because there’s all nine of them, with masks on.’ He went to say something else and his breath caught. ‘Mum and Dad …’

I waited for him.

‘They wore these stupid zombie masks.’

It seemed a trivial, almost comical detail at first, but this was exactly the kind of thing that swelled and intensified the longer a person was missing. It became the element that the families fixated on when they were left behind, the madness in which they tried to find rational answers. Was there something in that choice of mask? Had it been a sign? Did it mean something? Ross’s parents were out there somewhere, maybe dead, maybe alive. The more he thought about that, the more it became significant.

To Ross Perry, the choice of mask was some kind of portent.

In the sky around us, the storm had started to break: there was a charge in the air, and though I could almost feel it on my skin, I wasn’t thinking about it.

I was thinking about the Halloween party.

For the media, it had been a gift: three couples, and the farmer and his family, all vanishing into thin air, never to be seen again, on the same night the world celebrated monsters, and ghosts, and the unexplained. It had allowed journalists to push the idea that Halloween might, in some way, be responsible for what had happened at Black Gale, that something this strange, this uncharted, could only ever have occurred on the last night of October. And the longer the police went without something tangible to counter it with – some compelling piece of evidence, some theory that altered the narrative – the more the idea began to take hold.

Two and half years on, the disappearances had long faded from the headlines, and from most people’s memories as well, but in the online accounts of that night the concept of Halloween was still deeply embedded, not least because you almost always found the same image republished. It had become synonymous with the case: a front page from one of the country’s biggest tabloids, published on 5 November, two days after Ross called the police. The headline was GHOST HOUSE. Under that was a subhead: Like something out of the Twilight Zone … Beneath both of those was the now familiar image of the farm, abandoned and dark.