‘Maybe he did it because that made most sense: when Francesca was home, he could spend time with her; when she wasn’t, he could spend time taking his photos.’

Except his camera didn’t work.

And Francesca had called his hobby an obsession.

So was her comment, as Ross believed, a bit of light-hearted fun? Or had she actually started to suspect her husband was up to something?

I heard Tori moving. ‘I mean, anything’s possible.’ A door opening and closing and then the sound of paper – a file maybe, or a pad. ‘I’m just flicking through my notes here …’ Another pause. ‘After they all disappeared, I tried writing down everything I could remember Laura saying about the neighbours.’

I brought my own pad towards me.

‘To be honest, though, most of it’s pretty good.’ She sounded disappointed, but it wasn’t surprising: the fact that everyone in Black Gale had got on, and that the neighbours had all liked each other, had been clear from the start. ‘She said Patrick was handsome, charming, funny – basically, she said he was the type you could imagine women dropping their knickers for, and after Laura kept seeing him going out on to the moors, we talked about whether he could be having his end away. I said to her it sounded like it had all the hallmarks of an affair, but I’ve written that Laura said – and I quote – “If Patrick was having an affair, I bet it’s weighing heavy on his conscience.” It’s definitely possible that I’ve massively paraphrased that, because I wrote this down at least a month after Halloween, but even if the words aren’t right, the sentiment is. Patrick might have been having an affair, but whatever pleasure he got from it would have been offset against the guilt he felt at cheating on Francesca.’

I looked at the photograph of Patrick I had on the wall.

‘Do you think he was having an affair?’ Tori asked me.

It was still hard to say for sure, but I had to consider it, just as I had to consider something else: that whatever happened to Beatrix Steards in 1987 had eventually had a knock-on effect in Black Gale two and a half years ago; that whatever he’d been looking for in her case, he’d found.

And it was the reason he disappeared that night.

And the reason eight others did too.

29

The interview with Adrian Vale, the main suspect in Beatrix Steards’s disappearance, took place with DS Smoulter in Walworth on 6 March 1987, two days after Beatrix was reported missing by two friends she shared a fifth-floor flat with in Bermondsey.