When Derryn was dying, her body, and then her voice, and then her breath, fading into memory as she was swallowed by a disease I couldn’t fight for her, my lucidity was how I survived. And nearly a decade on, before this darkness, it was still keeping me safe: my days and nights were still filled with the faces of the missing, with the echoes of their voices, with stories in whose tragedy I sometimes saw no light. Deep down, I knew that finding people allowed me to fix things: the ragged fractures created by a disappearance; the ambiguity when someone vanished; the continual, unanswered sense of loss. Sometimes, when I brought people home alive, I got to raze grief to the ground entirely. I wanted families to feel that. I wanted them to remember what it was like to breathe, because when you lose someone you love, it just completely hollows you out.

You barely exhale; you barely exist.

I never wanted anyone else to feel the way I did.

So, even in times when I’ve doubted myself, when I’ve glimpsed the absolute darkness in men, the terrible things they’re capable of doing to one another and the tremors their choices leave behind, I’ve had my mind. I’ve had a clarity of purpose. I’ve kept working, searching, taking the next case, and the next, and the next. And when the police would hit a wall, when the questions were thriving like weeds, I was always there for the families with a way forward.

But where is the way forward from here?

How do I fix this?

How will I ever find my way home?

58

For what felt like weeks, all I knew was darkness and silence.

In a place bereft of light and sound, I had no choice but to replay the moments before he’d drugged me, pausing and rewinding the image of him standing next to me; of my wrists and ankles bound to a chair; of him speaking to me in an accent he’d kept hidden for nearly twenty-nine years. On some level, I started to wonder if maybe I’d known what was coming before it had even got to that; maybe I’d seen through the disguise the second I stood in front of the photos that had covered an entire wall of his home.

But, if I had, I’d been too slow to stop him.

Instead, imprisoned in a blackness I couldn’t escape from, I started putting it all together in my head, a jigsaw puzzle of stitched pieces that I grew to know intimately. The disappearance of Beatrix Steards in London at the start of 1987. Nine people vanishing from a remote village in Yorkshire. And, somewhere among it all, the body of a man on a beach in Sussex in October 1989.

Back then, DNA analysis was still in its infancy.

And that was exactly how he’d got away with it.