It was taken from his passport, the whole first page photocopied. Dark-haired and handsome, he appeared athletic, his chocolate-brown eyes pinpricked with tiny blobs of light, his jaw strong and square, the muscles at his neck developed enough to confirm a love of working out. In fact, he looked more like a poster boy for weight training than an academic superstar, but a superstar he obviously was: one of his lecturers told Smoulter that Vale was ‘one of the brightest and most purely talented students I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach’. When the lecturer was asked by Smoulter how he would describe Vale as a person, the response was just as unequivocal: ‘He’s a lovely young man: humble enough to sit and listen when he doesn’t know something – and admit that he doesn’t, which takes just as much modesty – but confident enough to argue a point when he strongly disagrees.’

I wrote down the quote and switched tack.

Smoulter had tried to pursue the idea that, because Vale had admitted to finding Beatrix attractive, it in some way implicated him in her disappearance. In the days after his interview with Vale, he’d returned to Robert Zaid, another of the students on the Politics postgrad, and the person who first suggested that Vale might have liked Beatrix; or ‘fancied her’, in Zaid’s words. It was a comment that Zaid, from what I could see, had made only in passing, and without being one hundred per cent certain it was true, but it was a comment that Smoulter had zeroed in on and which, over the course of those first few weeks, became a central pillar of his search.

Unlike Adrian Vale, Zaid hadn’t come from a working-class family: his father was from Iran, a multimillionaire who’d made his money in oil and construction, and who – after the 1979 revolution – had settled permanently in Camden Town. Zaid’s mother, whom his father had originally met at Princeton while they were both studying there, was a former model from Budapest. Robert Zaid was born in Tehran but had been educated in England from the age of eleven, attending a boarding school in Gloucestershire. After A levels, he chose to read History at King’s.

That was the course on which he’d met Beatrix.