Despite his academic brilliance, he’d also had few, if any, close relationships. When interviewed by police, the two men he rented a room from in Cask Lane said they barely talked to him, or saw him, in the entire time he was sharing with them. Perhaps that, and the lack of employment, was a contributing factor in what happened next, perhaps the fact that he was so far away from home, or perhaps none of it, but somewhere in the time after he ceased to be a student, his life must have taken a turn, because Vale hadn’t passed away due to a physical disease. He hadn’t become a victim of a crime or been in a car accident. He’d lost no battle with his bones, or his blood, or his internal organs; just his head.

He’d committed suicide.

His body was found on the East Sussex coast, where majestic chalk cliffs rose out of the sea to heights of five hundred feet. The actual date of his death was hard to pin down because there were no witnesses, but after a father and son – sailing past an isolated cove in their boat – spotted a body on the shore, a pathologist suggested it could have been there for up to two months. It was hard not to feel sorry for Vale, despite the lingering suspicions that Smoulter had had about him: not a single person had reported him missing, even the people he shared a house with, and about thirty feet from his body, police found his wallet. There was a suicide note inside that he’d failed to finish. It talked about how lonely he was and how much he missed his mother, who’d died the January before.

I leaned back on the bed.

There was nothing in the casework that directly connected Beatrix Steards or Adrian Vale to Patrick Perry or the other residents of Black Gale. There wasn’t even a hint of a geographical tie-up either: the disappearance of Beatrix Steards, the suspicions about Vale, as well as his subsequent suicide, had all taken place hundreds of miles from the Yorkshire Dales. The timings were all way off too: when Beatrix went missing in 1987, when Vale jumped to his death in 1989, Black Gale didn’t even exist. It would be three decades before its residents vanished.

So why the hell was Patrick so interested in Beatrix?

I began robotically tabbing back through the pages of the file, but I was only half concentrating. My mind was turning, full of static and noise, heavy with questions that still lacked answers and didn’t look any closer to getting them. Where were the links? Where was Patrick’s motivation for digging around in a thirty-year-old case? Where were the reasons for what happened at Black Gale, for the hidden audio devices inside the houses? Who was Isaac Mills?

And then everything shifted into focus.