I looked at the pictures of Ross again. He was an only child. John and Freda Davey’s daughter, Rina Blake, had a brother, Ian, but he was in Singapore. Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson had never married and never had kids. Chris Gibbs had a sister who lived in London called Tori, but his parents were both gone. Laura Gibbs didn’t have any siblings and her mother was in a nursing home in Leeds and had late-stage dementia. What that meant was that there were surprisingly few family connections left behind: Ross Perry, Tori Gibbs, Rina Blake, and then her brother who lived and worked seven thousand miles away and who, with the best will in the world, was going to be of little help in the search for answers. It was why everything had begun to drift. It was always the reason cases began to drift. The fewer people directly connected to a disappearance, the more difficult it was for it to stay afloat.

‘Have you got keys to the other houses?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Ross replied, and reached into his coat pocket. ‘Because Tori’s in London and Rina’s in Cambridge, they like me to check on the properties when I come up here. I tend to come every couple of weeks or so, just to make sure everything’s all right.’ He handed me a set of keys. ‘The one for Randolph and Emiline’s place is on there too. It’s still complicated, obviously, because we don’t know if any of them are …’ He trailed off. Dead. He couldn’t say the word and I didn’t blame him. That was the best and worst bit about a disappearance: there was always the chance they were still alive, so you always had hope, but it was the hope that so often inflicted the most damage. ‘What I mean is,’ he continued, his voice low, affected by what lay unspoken, ‘in Randolph and Emiline’s will, they state that they want any money from the sale of the house to go to charity, but nothing can be done until we know for sure what happened to them. So, in the meantime, the key is with their solicitors, and because I’ve worked with the firm before, and recommended them to clients of mine – and because I’m checking on the properties every fortnight or so – Randolph and Emiline’s solicitor gave me a copy of the key.’