‘Basically, I think they were all affected by her going missing in the manner she did. Zaid said she was always the life and soul, the glue that kept them together, and after she vanished – and especially after rumours started spreading that Vale might have had something to do with it – it created tension, resentment and paranoia.’ Patrick paused and I listened to the rain on the roof, my windscreen wipers sloshing back and forth. ‘Zaid reckoned that a few of the guys he did the course with began turning on Vale. They’d refuse to speak to him. Vale would try to engage with them and they’d call him a “rapist” or a “killer”. Zaid says he tried to avoid getting involved, but it was hard because he felt so upset by what had happened to Beatrix, and admitted being seduced by the pack mentality a couple of times. He said part of the reason it got so bad was because, a lot of the time, Vale would just sit there and take it; he’d just let them throw all these accusations at him, point fingers at him, sometimes push him around. Vale was a big guy – six two, seventeen stone – but Zaid said his temperament was the opposite. He looked like someone who’d been bullied for years and was conditioned to it. He was your classic loner.’

Either Patrick or the woman shifted position slightly.

‘So,’ Patrick continued, ‘as I said, after Beatrix went missing, it sounds like it got messy: arguments, anger, a lot of fighting and accusations, and almost all of it was directed at Adrian Vale. The irony is, when Vale turned up dead on that beach in Sussex, Zaid said he read about it in the papers, then spent months feeling like he and the others were responsible. In his suicide note, there’s a line where Vale mentioned being unhappy during his time at uni, so it’s possible Zaid is right. He might not have pushed Vale that day, but all of them on that course – by virtue of how they behaved towards him – probably got Vale to the edge.’

‘Or maybe they didn’t,’ the woman said.

‘Right. Maybe Vale really, genuinely, was responsible for Beatrix going missing, he knew what happened to her afterwards, and he made that jump because he couldn’t live with himself.’

I glanced at the Dictaphone.

Something had changed.

The trajectory of the conversation had altered.