He began discussing Adrian Vale, his background, the fact that he’d been bright, on a fully paid scholarship and on the same Politics course as Beatrix. After a while, he veered away from Vale to discuss the details of Beatrix’s disappearance, the search for her, and what he’d had passed on to him from a source in the Greater Manchester Police. That was Kevin Quinn. He didn’t name Quinn, but I knew that was where all of this had come from, and not only because Quinn had already confirmed as much, but because everything Patrick talked about was pretty much lifted directly from what I’d already seen in Beatrix’s case file. And then he said, ‘I got through to Robert Zaid last week.’

Zaid was the guy that Beatrix Steards had been through university with, first as they’d studied History, then during the Politics postgrad. The Met had talked to him about Beatrix, about Adrian Vale, and as I recalled that, I recalled something else – what Zaid had said to DS Smoulter during an informal interview: Beatrix, me and a couple of others were walking back from the pub and one of the guys said, ‘Isn’t that Adrian?’ And we all looked around, and it was definitely him, but when he saw us, he darted off into this side street and didn’t appear again.

Smoulter had always liked Vale for Beatrix’s disappearance but had never had enough evidence to pin it on him, and then two years later, on 12 October 1989, Vale’s body was discovered on a beach in Sussex after he committed suicide. So was it possible that Beatrix’s killer was Vale after all, not the woman talking to Patrick on this tape? Could he have jumped to his death because he felt so guilty about what he’d done? I listened to the buzz on the Dictaphone, to the faint hum of background noise filling the space between conversation. It was possible. But it was just as possible that this woman’s confession was real, and that Adrian Vale had ended up on that beach because he was depressed and grieving. His mother, who he was close to, died the January before he did, something he’d mentioned in a half-finished suicide note left on the beach. He was lonely and reclusive, which was backed up by the fact that not one person – not even the men he shared a house with – realized he was missing.

‘So what did Zaid say?’ the woman asked.

As I listened to her voice, I thought, Who are you?

Were you really the one that killed Beatrix Steards?

If you did, why didn’t Patrick go to the cops?