He looked around the house, his expression dropping slightly, as if he hadn’t noticed before how dark it was, how quiet and uninhabited. As I walked through to the kitchen, modern and smelling of surface cleaner, I heard the vent flicker into life. I heard a fence post creak softly in the garden, the weathervane again, and a rumble of thunder. But then all of those noises died away and in their place came an almost suffocating quiet. For a moment, the moors were absolutely soundless, and so were the houses.

I had to find a way to make these walls talk.

5

I headed upstairs.

At the top there were skylights, so it immediately felt lighter and less closed in than downstairs, even if the air was still dry. The main bedroom had an en suite and a walk-in wardrobe, and there were two spare bedrooms either side of it.

The fourth room was an office.

I stopped in the doorway and looked around. On the walls were some framed art, an autographed Manchester United shirt, and a three-tiered bookcase. There was another free-standing bookcase below that. The shelves were filled with classic literature, but there were a few sports biographies in the one on the wall and some books on journalism in both. On top of the mounted bookcase were two picture frames – glossy reprints of Manchester Evening News front pages. One was about a violent gangland shooting, the other was about how the leader of Manchester City Council had illegally redirected taxpayers’ money to the account of his mistress. The stories had been written in the 1990s and Patrick’s byline was on both.

There was a computer on the desk, but the hard drive had been removed from the tower and was sitting next to it, still wrapped in an evidence bag. The fact that it had been returned suggested nothing had been found on it by the forensics team.

I returned to each of the bedrooms, looking for personal possessions that had been left, keepsakes, photographs of any worth, but nothing caught my eye. Heading back to the office, I grabbed the tower and the hard drive and, downstairs, placed them next to the front door. After that, I started searching the living room. I was getting a good sense of the Perrys – what films they liked, the authors they read, the type of art they liked hanging on the walls – but it didn’t answer any questions about how and why they had vanished. The only item of interest was a shoebox of photographs in the sideboard. They were different from the pictures on the wall: less staged, more authentic maybe, which in turn meant that they might carry some tiny hints or clues.