The idea that they might have been romantically involved was one I couldn’t dismiss, but I put it on the back burner for now. Instead, I rang some old newspaper colleagues of Patrick’s, using numbers I found online, trying to get some sort of idea of when his interest in Beatrix Steards might have started. Could it have begun while he was still working at the Manchester Evening News? It was a theory that almost immediately got dismissed.

‘Why would he be interested in a girl who disappeared in London?’ his former editor asked me when I finally managed to track him down. ‘Pat ran plenty of stories past me in the time he was with us, but she wasn’t one of them. And even if she was, why would I ever publish it? Tragic as it sounds, we deal with news in Manchester.’

I spoke to a couple of other journalists who said the same thing, and then started trying to work another angle, cross-referencing King’s College courses at the time Beatrix vanished with ones offered at Manchester University, where Patrick had studied English, at the same point in history. It was slow, difficult work – both on the net and on the phone – because of the amount of time that had passed, and impossible to answer anything conclusively, but there was no hint of a collaboration or exchange programme between the two universities, no hint at all that Patrick and Beatrix may have moved in the same circles in their early twenties.

I tabbed back to the start of the file and looked at the photo of Beatrix Steards at the front. It was exactly the same as the one I’d seen already online, just a better-quality version. I zoomed in a little, trying to get a clearer sense of her face, of the colour of her eyes: they were light green, almost grey, and her mouth was turned up into a hint of a smile, framed perfectly between the two vertical lines of her bob. And then, on the right-hand side of her face, just below her eye, was what I’d thought might have been a mole, or perhaps some minor scarring. But, in fact, it was neither.

It was a birthmark, pale brown and oddly shaped.

Almost like a butterfly.

I picked up the phone to Ross again. It had only been a matter of hours since I’d last called him, asking if he’d ever heard the name Kevin Quinn, but he told me I could call when I needed, and he was stuck in traffic on the way home, anyway.

‘Can you remember when your mum and dad met?’ I asked him.

‘Mum said she was nineteen, so that would have made it …’ He stopped, trying to do the sums. ‘About 1986. They dated for four years and got married in July 1990.’

‘Your mum was from Italy originally, is that correct?’

‘Florence, yes.’

‘When did she move here?’