The number listed for that had a +44 international code and, when she reverse-traced it to its source, she discovered it was a payphone in a place called Sedbergh, a small town in the county of Cumbria. She had no idea where either of those were, but this time she didn’t let anything else get in her way. She spent hours researching the area and looking for Patricks in it.

When she still couldn’t find him, she started massaging the truth. She called the police forces in Cumbria and North Yorkshire, and told them she worked for the LAPD. Worked. It was technically correct, she just hadn’t worked for them for almost fifteen years. To her surprise, it started opening some doors – slowly. Cops in both police forces said they would call her back, and the Met said the same thing when she got in touch with them about the unsolved disappearance of Beatrix Steards. After that, it became a waiting game. Weeks and months would pass, and then she would chase again, and then she would get the same vague reassurances about a response, wait some more, and would have to chase anew. Eventually, though, she got the answers she needed. The name Patrick was a dead end and so was the town of Sedbergh.

But Beatrix Steards was different.

Two years after the phone call from Patrick, after being passed between different detectives, someone at the Met agreed to talk to her in detail about Beatrix Steards. She sat at a window thousands of miles away, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and made pages of notes, and at the end, when she asked for the name of the last person to access the case, the cop told her: Detective Inspector Kevin Quinn.

She chased him for months, emailing him, leaving messages for him, and in the end she figured she was going to have to try some other route. But then Quinn called her back one day, at the start of April, almost two and a half years after she first picked up the call from the man called Patrick.

‘Are you a mate of Raker’s?’ he asked her.

‘Who’s Raker?’

There was a pause on the line.

‘You haven’t talked to him?’

‘I haven’t talked to anyone,’ she said. ‘Who’s Raker?’

‘David Raker. He called me about this same thing a few weeks back.’

She dragged her iPad towards her, swiped it on, and put in a quick Google search for David Raker. She found him easily: he was a missing persons investigator, based in London.

‘Did this Raker enquire about a guy called Patrick?’ she asked Quinn.

‘Patrick? You mean Patrick Perry?’