It was a bright day in late May, the sun cresting the peaks of the Dales, and, as we waited for the other two, Tori and I talked about Adrian Vale, a man she’d spent the last four weeks researching and writing about. She’d been writing about her brother, about Laura and Mark, about the other Black Gale residents too, for her employer, FeedMe, in an attempt to give an accurate portrayal of who they were and what their lives had been like. A lot of the newspaper reporting about the villagers had been inaccurate, so it was an attempt to put the truth on record, and it was cathartic for her as well. But the Vale part of the story was harder to address because she was writing about a man for whom law and structure were just another lie.

His life as Robert Zaid – his casual murder of a fellow student back in 1989; the staggering act of bravura in becoming him – had fuelled much of what had run in the newspapers, on TV and online. I read and watched it all when I got back, every line on every page, every word out of the mouth of every reporter, dismissing the lies and using the rest to fill in some gaps and build a more reliable timeline of what I hadn’t known. Annabel told me that she’d contacted the police when she hadn’t been able to get hold of me for eight days, but hadn’t officially filed a missing persons report until three and a half weeks in: the catalyst for that had been an American woman, Jo, calling her up to ask her if she’d seen or heard from me. And, while the Met did begin a proper investigation, despite all my history with them, it took an anonymous call to my daughter four days later for the case to find any actual traction.

The anonymous caller had been Healy.

He’d told her to go back to the Met and tell them that they needed to look into Robert Zaid. He knew that was the last place I’d been seen, and although he didn’t know that Zaid was actually Adrian Vale, he knew I went there and never came back.

It had been a powerful, selfless act.