In a square box at the bottom left of the screen he was talking to two men and a woman from an insurance company in Selby about a redundancy process they were about to embark upon. He was smartly dressed in a shirt, grey waistcoat and mauve tie, and spoke in a soft northern accent. He was urbane, stylish, engaging, even about subjects that were tedious, and had the appearance of a figurehead, of someone who could gain business based on nothing more than his good looks and personality. So why was his presence online so subdued?

‘Any other questions you have,’ he said to the trio, writing something down, ‘just send them over.’ I watched him, his ease with them, his humour. ‘I’ve recorded this session because I know you guys like to have a copy of all our correspondence, and because the legalities of employment law are obviously a very exciting subject, so you’ll definitely want to watch this again.’ They laughed, and then again as Pierce looked into the camera and straightened his tie, insinuating that – if they ever did watch it back – he’d be looking his best. ‘I’ll be back in touch very soon.’

They said their goodbyes and the screen went blank.

I stood staring at the television, still asking myself why a man like this was so determined to spend so much of his life below the radar. When I played the second recording, I discovered it was the same three people from the same insurance company, Pierce as smart and gregarious as before. After watching it through, I switched the whole system off, reset the camera and returned to his PC, sliding in at the desk and firing up his email.

Unlike his employees, Pierce had password-protected his inbox. It didn’t necessarily mean anything – most people did the same; it was rarer to find an email client open – but while there was little of interest among the documents on his hard drive, when I switched to the Internet, I instantly saw something was off.

He was using two different browsers.

In Explorer, his history was littered with uninteresting stop-offs, all related to work he’d been hired for or was advising on. There were brief detours to other websites, unrelated to his profession, but they weren’t exciting either. Online newspapers. Shopping. Sport.

Chrome was different.

Before I’d even got to his history, I could see he’d added an extension. Its icon was in the corner of the browser window and, when I clicked on it, I realized he’d downloaded a proxy and VPN service.

It was software that let him mask his IP address.

A menu was showing his location as somewhere in Sweden.

For a second, a buzz of excitement charged through me, but then I went to his history, expecting a waterfall of websites, confirmation of why I was here, of why Mills had handed me the alarm code, and found nothing.