After going through the kitchen again, I did another circuit of the house, this time going back to front in order to check access points. None of the windows or the doors had been tampered with. I was looking for clear indications that someone had come back in the aftermath of the disappearances and tried to get into the property, for whatever reason, but there was nothing as conspicuous as a jimmied window and no suggestion the locks had been picked. I grabbed everything and headed outside.

It was raining hard now, chattering off the stone of the cottages and slapping against the mud. As quickly as I could, I loaded the PC, the hard drive and the photos into the Audi and then waited under the porch for Ross to finish a call. I could hear snatches because he had it on speaker, but I wasn’t really listening. Instead, I was trying to build a picture of what might have happened here two and a half years ago.

One of the theories the police had initially floated was the idea that the villagers had all headed out on to the moors as part of a dare, or a game, fuelled by booze. From what had been found in the recycling bins at the back of the farmhouse, at least three bottles of wine, eighteen bottles of lager and a bottle of rum had been consumed that night, so even if not all of them were drinking at the same rate, most of the neighbours were likely to have been pretty well oiled by the evening’s end. Perhaps they were trying to frighten each other with their Halloween masks. Perhaps it was a drunken game of hide-and-seek. The moors at night, unlit by street lamps or nearby towns, would have been the perfect setting for that kind of thing, especially when there was enough alcohol in the blood. Police surmised that a game could be the sort of thing you might suddenly decide to do when you’re intoxicated, the kind of unplanned change of direction that felt like the funniest, most important thing in the world after four or five drinks. But it wasn’t a theory that held up to any real scrutiny.

And it was why the cops had ditched it soon after.

A game of hide-and-seek in Halloween masks might have fitted the profile of a group of people in their teens, maybe even in their twenties or thirties, but it was harder to picture a group in their fifties, sixties and seventies heading out on to the moors after dinner, in the dark. Randolph Solomon’s medical records showed that he’d had a hip replacement the previous June, and old medication found in John and Freda Davey’s bathroom confirmed that she’d had oral chemotherapy the year before and was – at the time of her disappearance – taking painkillers for an ongoing muscle complaint.