‘What if someone forced them to leave?’ Healy asked, as if he knew where my thoughts were at.

‘There were no foreign tyre tracks in the village.’

‘Maybe whoever it was came in on foot.’

‘One person versus nine?’

‘The person could have been armed.’

‘Still,’ I said, ‘it’s not great odds. You only have to make one mistake, turn your back at the wrong moment. Even with a gun, it’s tricky to herd nine people around.’

‘Maybe there was more than one attacker.’

‘If there was, there should have been evidence of it.’

He’d started nodding before I’d even finished my sentence because he already knew it was unlikely to have happened in that way: there wasn’t only a lack of tyre tracks, but forensic techs had meticulously matched footprints in and around the properties to footwear left behind in the four homes. That still left the shoes that the nine villagers were wearing at the time they exited the village – which, of course, the investigators couldn’t match in the same way – but there were no prints leading up to Black Gale’s main gate, suggesting they hadn’t left on foot, and the unmatched moulds taken from the scene belonged to nine people and nine pairs of shoes. So, in essence, the police had nine shoe prints they couldn’t definitively link to the missing villagers, but it was almost one hundred per cent likely that it was them, especially as those footprints all moved in the same patterns around the homes, in repeated loops.

‘What’s your thinking on the timing?’ Healy asked me. ‘Did they disappear on Halloween night? The next morning? November the 2nd?’

I looked at the selfies that Chris Gibbs had taken and then picked up one of the shots: ‘It says in the file that none of the clothes they’re wearing in these pictures are listed as clothing the police found in any of the four homes, right?’

He nodded, again seeing where I was going: the clothes in the selfies weren’t discovered in any of the properties, which heavily suggested that the villagers were still wearing them at the time they left the village.

‘I think it happened on Halloween night,’ I said.

‘Or they woke early and pulled on exactly the same clothes as the night before because they’d been left nearby in the bedrooms and were convenient.’