‘When she was fifteen.’

‘And her family moved from Italy to where?’

‘Liverpool.’

He was smart, so even if he didn’t know where the questions were going, he knew they were loaded. I was looking for reasons why Patrick might have headed south, even if it was only briefly, around 1986 or 1987. But if Francesca had been based in Liverpool, he would have been travelling back and forth to see her.

‘Did your dad ever mention a woman called Beatrix Steards to you?’

‘Who?’

‘Beatrix Steards. She was from London.’ I spelled out her name for him. ‘Maybe it was a friend of his, or a girlfriend. This would have been when Patrick was about twenty-two.’

‘When he was twenty-two, he was dating Mum.’

I looked at the wall of photographs; didn’t say anything.

‘Wait a second, are you wondering if Dad was carrying on with this woman behind Mum’s back?’ The thought seemed to rattle him, the confusion evident in his silence, but then he came back hard: ‘That never happened. Honestly, I’m telling you, Dad never spent time down south. His education was up here, he was working for a Manchester newspaper – he had no reason to be in London, ever. Plus, he’d only started dating Mum the year before. Why would he go off with someone else and come back and marry Mum? How would he have met this woman in the first place?’

They were both valid points, but people did all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, and made all sorts of connections. And, anyway, an affair wasn’t the extent of my thinking. I’d decided against voicing it in front of Ross – because if he struggled with the idea of his dad cheating, he would never contemplate something even worse – but could Patrick have had something to do with Beatrix Steards going missing?

Based on most of what I’d read and heard about Patrick Perry so far, the idea didn’t necessarily land, but then he’d lied to Laura Gibbs, and more importantly to his wife, about why he’d repeatedly headed out to the moors in those last few months, so was it really so hard to believe he might lie about this?

I thanked Ross, hung up and called Tori Gibbs.

‘You told me the other night what Laura said to you about Patrick,’ I started. ‘Did Laura ever say anything else to you about him? By that I mean what sort of person he was.’

‘You mean was he the cheating type?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Was he?’

Tori’s breath crackled in the phone. ‘She said she didn’t think so – she said his wife was a real beauty too, and they seemed devoted to one another – but then it’s weird, right? Heading out to the moors like that, but only when your wife isn’t home.’