Back in the present, I decided to drive all the way to Keighley again, to see if Mills had returned, but the house was exactly as I’d left it, and when I got back to Melia Griffin’s place again, I slipped into the same holding pattern as before, filling my time by replaying sections of the conversation between Patrick and Freda. I listened to their voices and then looked at my notebook, at the frayed margins where some of the pages had been torn out, at others that I’d filled up in the hours since. I got my mobile and went through the pictures I’d taken in the room at Seiger and Sten: the clothes, the smashed iPad and phones, the driving licences behind windows in wallets. And then I looked up and the sun had begun to set, the brightness of the sky giving way to a mauve sweep. The daughter was arriving home again, her eyes still fixed on her phone.

As she let herself in, reality started to hit me: no matter how long I sat waiting – or how patient I was – Mills wasn’t coming here.

He wasn’t going home either.

But that didn’t mean Melia couldn’t tell me where he was.

49

Melia and her kids lived in an end terrace, a short alleyway running along the left edge of the property, their back garden ending at a row of high laurel bushes, as thick and as opaque as a wall.

I moved along the alleyway first, giving myself some time to think: just knocking on the door was never going to cut it. It would put her on edge. I had to know exactly what I was going to say. At the petrol station, when we’d first met, she’d struggled to remember me, and I had no idea what Mills might have said in the meantime if she’d asked who I was. He could have lied and said that I was the person I’d pretended to be, a guy she and Isaac had bumped into in town a few weeks before that. Or he could have told her that he had no idea who I was.

I doubted that he’d told her the actual truth, though.

I stopped, level with the end of the back garden, using the gathering shadows as a way to take in the property. Because it had been warm this afternoon – or, at least, a lot warmer than previous days – the kitchen window was open, and so was the window of one of the bedrooms on the second floor, and in both I could see movement: Melia was standing at the sink, and her son was in his room, playing video games.

I waited some more, watching.

She was leaning against one of the kitchen units now, her body side-on to me, her head bowed, her face painted a soft, pale grey.

It looked like she was texting.