I looked over at the forest where I’d left Jo, at the mountains, the lake, the absolute emptiness of the road, then at the sign, at the name of a town I’d never heard of and could hardly pronounce, forty-three kilometres away.

This was how Vale had made an entire village disappear. He must have realized it was how he could make anyone disappear.

This was his final, awful act of cruelty.

He hid his victims on a plane.

And then he killed them in another country entirely.

Part Ten

THE AFTERMATH

71

A month later, I met Ross Perry, Rina Blake and Tori Gibbs at Black Gale.

In the intervening period, the story about the village, about its connection to the abduction and murder of Beatrix Steards, about its tethers back to a double murder in Los Angeles in 1985 – and about the nearly forgotten ‘suicide’ of a young student in Sussex four years later – had already begun to burn out, the front-page headlines gone, the sensationalized accounts of what had happened all written.

The story, instead, had altered course.

It had become about Jo and me.

It had become about what happened to us after Vale was dead and Mills had killed himself. It was about what had happened to us as we’d tried to find our way out of the forest.

I’d spoken on the phone to Ross, Rina and Tori a couple of days after I finally got back to London. At the time, I was broken, barely functioning – physically and mentally – but I tried to give them the fullest and most detailed account I could stomach. The problem was, the lurid stories in the media had been so relentless in the time I’d been away that it became difficult to convince them that the whole truth wasn’t necessarily in the newspaper accounts they’d read, so I suggested we meet at Black Gale. It was the place where everything had begun, the village in which the four families had lived so happily. It seemed like a place where I could give them some facts, some colour, and help them find some closure.

Tori Gibbs arrived first.