Smoulter hadn’t conducted an official interview with Zaid, but there were a few notes, including one quote that Smoulter had directly attributed to Zaid, and that he’d written in the margins of the file, verbatim: I didn’t mind Adrian. I never had a problem with him at all. But he could be a bit weird sometimes. Like, there was this night when Beatrix, me and a couple of others were walking back from the pub and one of the guys turned around and said, ‘Isn’t that Adrian?’ And we all looked around, and it was definitely Adrian, but when he saw us, he darted off into this side street and didn’t appear again. I remember saying to Beatrix, ‘That was a bit odd,’ and she said, ‘Not if you know Adrian Vale, it isn’t.’

So was this the reason that DS Smoulter had dug his nails into Vale and refused to let go? Zaid’s comments seemed to suggest that Vale might have been following – possibly even stalking – Beatrix, and it wasn’t only Zaid who believed Vale liked her: a couple of other friends were spoken to by Smoulter and they all said similar things. Ultimately, it didn’t amount to much more than hearsay, and it would never form the basis of any genuine prosecution, but it built a broader picture, and especially showed how Vale seemed to exist on the periphery of the group. Still, even if Vale had liked Beatrix, even if he had followed her, did that make him responsible for her disappearance? The quote Smoulter had written down from Zaid made Vale’s behaviour sound weird, but being weird didn’t make Vale guilty.

I could see that the investigation started to stall pretty soon after. A week passed, and then a month, and then three, and the search for Beatrix Steards continued to go nowhere. The last entry of any significant kind – rather than bland statements about there being nothing new to report – was on 12 October 1989.

That was when Adrian Vale died.

31

Vale had still been living at the same address in Clapham, was unmarried with no children, and, apart from a short stint in April and May 1989 working part-time as an archivist at the British Library, appeared to have struggled to find work after finishing the postgrad in June 1988.