The kitchen was divided by an island, the cabinets on one side, a long oak table on the other. The table was where the four couples – and, presumably, at some point – Mark Gibbs had congregated for the Halloween dinner. It was hard to know whether he’d spent all night with his parents; the only thing that was certain was that, when everyone upped and left, he left with them. I found it hard to imagine that a nineteen-year-old kid would voluntarily want to hang out for an entire evening with his mum and dad and a bunch of people three – and in Randolph Solomon’s case, almost four – times as old as him, but he’d appeared in some of the photographs that his father had taken on the night of the disappearances. Maybe he came down for dinner, or just to say hello. Maybe he spent the rest of the time upstairs in his bedroom studying, or playing video games, or texting his friends.

None of the Halloween decorations were up any more, Tori Gibbs attending to her brother and sister-in-law’s house the same way Ross had done to his parents’, but the rest of the place looked untouched. Clean surfaces, clean carpets, beds made.

I went to the kitchen sink and looked out over the land at the back of the house. Two and a half years ago, there would have been hundreds of sheep, a few chickens in a pen too, but now the fields were empty and the runs were unfilled. The Gibbses had owned three dogs too, but those had been found new owners. In the media, on the twelve-month anniversary of the disappearances, Ross, Rina Blake and Tori Gibbs had tried to re-engage people by giving interviews to the local media, including the Yorkshire Evening Post, and it had been in that story that I’d read about Tori Gibbs having to sell off her brother’s livestock. She’d admitted to having no idea how much she should ask for them, and hadn’t even really been sure it was the right thing to do. What if he and Laura return home tomorrow? she’d said. Chris would have an absolute fit. This is his livelihood. But Chris Gibbs didn’t return home, and neither did the rest of them – so the sheep were sold and the moors became still.

I looked around the rest of the house – the living room, the bedrooms – grabbed an iPad from what appeared to be Laura’s bedside cabinet and a laptop belonging to Mark, and then ended up in a utility room at the back of the property. It had a sloped tiled roof and was glassed in on three sides, the views presumably spectacular on a clear day. Today wasn’t that day: a fog had begun dragging across the fields, following the swirling curtain of rain.