He was staring down at the ground, digging at the crazed earth with the toe of his boot. ‘Patrick and Freda had one conversation about Beatrix in their houses. It was the morning of the dinner party. It was the only time we ever actually heard them talk about her, even though we’d had the houses bugged for a week by that time, ever since Patrick went to see “Robert Zaid”. It turned out they always met away from Black Gale, where none of the other neighbours would see them or suspect anything.’

‘So what changed?’

He sighed. ‘Patrick started to see the links.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘After his interview with Robert Zaid, something started to rub at him.’

‘He figured out Robert Zaid was Adrian Vale.’

Mills shrugged. ‘I don’t know if he figured it out, but he told Freda something was up with Zaid. Francesca Perry was at work, John Davey was out at the shops somewhere, and so Patrick and Freda spoke on her doorstep. She was starting to go downhill by then, and while Patrick was working as hard as he could trying to find answers for her, he wasn’t working fast enough, and he knew it. And then there was this voice in his head niggling at him about Zaid. So he comes up with an idea.’

‘He says to Freda they need to tell everyone at the dinner party,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Because he thinks they can help?’

‘Laura Gibbs seemed bright, she was tenacious, she spent a lot of time online; when he wasn’t farming, her son spent even more, always on forums and all that shit, websites like Reddit where you could crowdsource an entire missing persons search using a bunch of Internet sleuths with too much time on their hands. Francesca had patient records at her fingertips and – who knows? – maybe Patrick could try and persuade her to call in a favour if they ever needed access to someone’s history in another hospital. John Davey was a historian, and good research skills were what they were after; even Emiline, the part-time librarian, was smart – bookish, academic. Plus, Chris Gibbs’s sister was some kind of writer for FeedMe, so she knew how to unearth a story as well. It was an intelligent move. Believe me, there were brains at that dinner table. But then, by looping everyone in, Freda had to tell them why she was doing it – and that meant telling them the truth.’

‘That she was looking for a daughter they didn’t know about.’

A breath of wind in the trees.

‘And that her cancer was terminal.’ Mills nodded. ‘That was the only thing holding her back.’

‘Because she hadn’t even told her husband or her kids.’

‘Right. They just thought she was delaying her treatment.’