Of all the couples at Black Gale, Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson were probably the least known. They had no kids and little in the way of close family, so, unlike the others, they had no one fighting to keep their story above water. Randolph had had a brother who’d died when still young, and Emiline was an only child whose parents were both long gone. They were active socially – he was a huge Middlesbrough fan and, until his hip replacement, had always attended home games with mates; she met a group of friends from school in Kendal once a week – and Emiline also had a part-time job at the library in Grassington. But none of that was much help in finding out what had happened to them: they’d said nothing out of the ordinary to people they’d known or worked with in the weeks leading up to Halloween – nothing about taking a holiday; no emergency trips – and Emiline hadn’t put in for any time off at the library.

Again, I moved through the house, picking up a Dell laptop from upstairs, and then stopped to look at pictures of the two of them in the living room. Their holidays didn’t appear to have been as exotic as the Perrys’, a mix of package deals to Spain and Portugal, and some city breaks to places like Berlin and Venice, but there were some shots from a trip they’d made to the States, maybe five or six years back. I got the sense though that, the trip to the US apart, foreign holidays weren’t as important to them, something backed up by another picture I found loose in one of the drawers: Randolph and Emiline standing either side of a 2012 Volkswagen camper van, a Caravan Club sticker in the window. It was parked on their driveway. I took the photo out, removed some of the others from their frames as well, and then pocketed them all.

Finally, I headed to the farmhouse.

Inside it was lovely: big rooms with beamed ceilings, white walls, bright, modern furniture; a mix of flagstone floors and carpets, with log burners in both the living room and the kitchen. Despite the power and heating being off, it was easy to imagine it as a home people loved coming to. Quiet as it was now, its former life echoed throughout.