Smoulter tried to push the same agenda for a while, tried to catch Vale out by mining for inconsistencies in his account of the night, but the interview began to wane shortly after and, towards the end, it became a painful exercise in repetition as Smoulter desperately attempted to unearth leads that clearly weren’t there. After two hours, Vale’s solicitor began to get more involved, and by the end he was cutting into Smoulter’s questions every time they were posed, querying relevance, objecting to veiled accusations and highlighting a lack of evidence tying Vale to any crime.

Finally, at 9.37 p.m. on 6 March 1987, the tape was turned off.

It was the one and only interview conducted with Vale.

Police appealed for other eyewitnesses: people who might have been on a night out in the area at the time, or perhaps been waiting on the platforms at Kennington station, where Beatrix had told Vale – and friends at the house party – that she’d been headed. There was no footage of her on CCTV, because her disappearance had taken place at a time when security cameras were nowhere near as prevalent, especially not within the concourses and corridors of the Underground, so the appeal eventually led nowhere. The more his investigation stalled, the more Smoulter went back to Vale, securing financial statements from his bank account at the Midland, as well as an itemized bill from the phone line he’d had at his flat near Clapham High Street.

Again, they were dead ends.

After that, Smoulter started digging into Vale’s upbringing, his background, his family, including the father Vale said had died when he was still only fifteen. That felt especially irrelevant, but I imagined it was done not because Smoulter distrusted the story that Vale had painted about his dad and his alcoholism – though he may have done – but because, by that stage, Smoulter and the Met were desperate. They had nothing. But, this time, the search failed for another reason, and it wasn’t down to the information not being there, it was down to it being hard to access.

Vale, it turned out, was in the UK on a scholarship.

He was American.

Clear: Part 1

1985

Los Angeles | Tuesday 30 July

The squad room was quiet, the graveyard shift gone, all of the desks empty except for one at the back where a member of the Night Stalker team was already in place and screaming into his phone about a detective he’d had to deal with at Glendale PD.