I had the phone on speaker.

Healy and I glanced at each other.

‘Do you remember when that upgrade started, Tori? It might be important.’

‘I don’t know.’ She sighed. I could hear the journalist in her, the texture in her reply as she realized she was being led. ‘Probably not long before they all vanished, I guess. A week maybe? Ten days?’

I flicked a look at Healy again.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I’m trying to work out who upgraded their broadband.’

‘You don’t think it was the phone company?’

‘No, it’s not that,’ I lied, ‘it’s just a gap in my paperwork, and I’m trying to make sure we’ve got as complete a picture of the run-up to Halloween as possible.’

It was fiction, and maybe she knew it, but I needed time to process what Healy and I had just found out before I was ready to share it with anyone else.

Healy rubbed at his forehead as I hung up.

‘They posed as engineers from the phone company,’ he muttered, so quietly it was almost like he was telling himself. He looked up. ‘Do you think it was Mills?’

I shrugged. ‘There’s probably no way of knowing now.’

Healy was looking at the empty wall, studying it so closely it was like all the information we’d gathered was still up there. Eventually, he said, ‘So I get why Patrick and Freda were targeted. They started looking into Beatrix Steards.’ He was still staring at the barren wall. ‘What I don’t get is, why bug all four houses and why take all nine people from Black Gale? It’s miles more complicated, it’s much riskier, and it didn’t need to be done, anyway. You reckon it was wrong place, wrong time?’

‘You mean, they were all at the farmhouse, so it was just easier to take all nine of them when they came for Freda and Patrick?’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

Abducting nine people was hard, it had the potential to go badly wrong very quickly, and none of the others posed a threat – so why bother involving them? Plus, whoever it was who’d come to Black Gale that night – whether it was Mills, Pierce, someone else or all of them – they wouldn’t have come unprepared. They’d been listening and watching Patrick and Freda for at least a week, possibly more, so they would have known about the dinner party; and even if, as unlikely as it was, they hadn’t known about the gathering until they actually arrived at the village, they’d have seen it and surely decided that any abduction was too risky.

‘Maybe the other villagers knew,’ Healy said.

‘You mean, they knew about Freda and Patrick’s search for Beatrix?’

He shrugged. ‘That would explain the need to take all nine of them.’