Grabbing my phone – a cheap replacement for the one that Mills and his accomplice had stolen from me at the cottage – I quickly took as many photos as I could. I started with the clothes, then the boxes, then the money that Jacob Pierce had locked away in here. After I was done I packed everything up again, trying to return it in the vague order in which I’d pulled it out. The checked shirt belonging to Chris Gibbs. A T-shirt with the poster for The Shining printed on it, belonging to Mark. The brown cords that Randolph Solomon had arrived in. John Davey’s blazer. Patrick’s green V-neck sweater. Emiline Wilson’s red-and-blue dress and the floral one that Freda Davey had been wearing. There was a small tube of painkillers too that Freda must have brought with her, her name printed in tiny letters on the side of it. In all that had happened, in the frantic search for answers, it was easy to forget that, a few months before she vanished, she’d found out that her cancer had come back.

The Black Gale residents’ phones were as useless as the iPad I’d found in the first box, destroyed in the same way. As I placed them back into the container, I tried to imagine why Pierce, or Mills, or whoever else was involved, kept everything hidden here and hadn’t just dumped it all somewhere remote. But then I started to see a kind of sense in it: if it was all in here, it would likely never get found.

If everything was left out there somewhere, it might.

Clothes took years to degrade. Nylon and leather lasted forty years, the Lycra in the exercise gear upwards of a hundred. They wouldn’t just disappear, not like human beings. We decayed. We atomized, sometimes – with the right conditions – in a matter of weeks. If a body was a skeleton, reduced to a series of disconnected parts over time, it became much harder to identify. If it was still clothed, and if those clothes matched the last description of what a missing person had been wearing, it opened up a pathway back to the disappearance, possibly to the suspect involved in taking them, and combined with DNA that might have been left in threads, on collars, on sleeves, investigators were suddenly armed. Keep the clothes, however, and another source of trace evidence was secured. Same with the phones: the batteries were gone, the SIM cards too, but a mobile still carried a model number, an IMEI barcode printed on the inside, and that made it possible to trace ownership. The wallets had driving licences, and bank cards, personal effects, and it all remained a risk if left out in the open.