It didn’t look like a home any more.

It looked like a mausoleum.

4

Inside, the Perry house was clean, the downstairs rooms orderly and attractive. Ross hadn’t just kept an eye on the property, he’d kept it looking the same as the day his mum and dad were last there. A refillable air freshener had been left running in the hallway, presumably in an effort to offset the musty aroma of a house without fresh air, but otherwise it appeared exactly like the photos attached to North Yorkshire Police’s original investigation.

I wiped my feet on the mat, and then took in the layout: stairs ahead of me, a kitchen beyond that which, in turn, led to the garden room; a large living room on the left with leather sofas in it. The hallway floors were oak, and on the wall beneath the incline of the staircase was a nest of family photographs, shaped like a tree. I could see Patrick and Francesca Perry at the centre, and then what I assumed were extended family at the edges, but mostly I could see Ross. As their only child, he was the dominant fixture in the tree, the pictures charting his life, from the day he was born, to a shot, only a couple of years old, of him in a suit, holding a trophy up at some sort of industry awards ceremony, his parents flanking him, proud, smiling.

I walked to the wall and looked more closely at the Perrys. In a shot similar to the one that had run most often in the media, they were outside a villa in Spain, Patrick in a polo shirt and shorts, Francesca in a dress, but in others the two of them were in the Alps, in Thailand, New York, Dubai. They were attractive, still young-looking even as they got to their late forties, Patrick handsome, tall and athletic, with silver-flecked hair, Francesca dark-eyed, dark-haired and slender.

‘They loved to travel,’ Ross said from behind me. ‘Even after so many years of being married, they never lost that spark. They just loved spending time together.’

That was pretty clear, but while the majority of the photographs of the two of them had been taken on holidays, there were a few that weren’t. In one, Patrick was in a pair of shorts, a vest and a hard hat, in the space that would eventually become their porch. Off to the side of the shot, I could see a vague image of the other two houses, less developed than the Perrys’ – in fact, little more than concrete beds at that stage.

‘Is it right that Chris Gibbs built these homes?’ I asked.