I looked at the wall, at a photograph I’d pinned up of Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson pointing at the Hollywood sign. Was it simply coincidence that, for one of the only long-haul holidays they’d chosen to take, they’d opted for the same city that Adrian Vale had been born and brought up in?

Or was there something worth looking for here?

On the wall next to the shot of Randolph and Emiline was a picture that Patrick Perry had taken of the moors, presumably on one of the unaccounted-for ‘hikes’ he’d made. I thought again about the idea of him having an affair with Emiline, even floated the possibility that I might have called it wrong and that it wasn’t Emiline but Freda Davey he was seeing, despite her health issues, and then I looped back around to the LA link and felt no closer to an answer for any of it.

Returning to the Beatrix Steards file, I refocused on Adrian Vale and began reading about how his father had been a manual labourer and his mother had cleaned rooms at an old hotel on Main Street, close to Union Station in downtown LA. I read about how he went to local elementary, middle and high schools, and had been such an outstanding student, and achieved such impressive results, that he was able to apply for and secure a full scholarship to Stanford University, where he studied at their prestigious Law School. After completing his degree there, he then applied for another scholarship, the Marshall, which at that time awarded thirty US-based students a bursary in order to continue their studies at a British university for up to two years. When Vale was selected, he chose to do Politics at King’s.

According to Home Office records, he flew into Heathrow on 28 June 1986 and had listed a house in Clapham as the place where he was staying. That was backed up by a contract that Smoulter had pulled from the local authority in Lambeth, which included Vale as one of three tenants paying rent on a house in Cask Lane, a road at the south end of Clapham High Street.

Much of the rest of the information that Smoulter had gathered on Vale felt at best extraneous and at worst irrelevant: other places that he’d travelled to on the same passport; a history of part-time employment he’d listed on an application he made for a weekend job at a pub near the Elephant and Castle; the contact details of his mother, who was – by 1987 – a widow; and purchases he’d put on a debit card, which rarely got more exciting than weekly grocery shopping and ATM withdrawals.

There was one photograph of him.