The offices of Seiger and Sten were raided within two hours of the first interview I did with the police. Jacob Pierce had already fled, his money gone, but the cardboard boxes full of clothes had been left behind. It turned out that what Isaac Mills had told me before he shot himself was right: the clothes in the first cardboard box belonged to other victims. Some belonging to Jo Kader had been found too, added after she’d disappeared. What she’d been wearing the day that Mills picked her up at the airport was in there; so were her iPad and her mobile phone, both of them destroyed.

But the rest of her things, the clothes she’d brought in her suitcase, as well as the suitcase itself, were eventually, painstakingly, traced back to a charity shop nine miles from Heathrow, via CCTV footage. The video showed Mills dropping all of it off within hours of her arrival in the country, and the fact that police had done that, and gone to those lengths, explained exactly why Vale kept the clothes his victims were last seen wearing in storage at Seiger and Sten. It was an extra insurance policy. Missing persons investigations always started with a physical description and a note on what that person had been wearing when they vanished – but both were irrelevant if neither could be found. And maybe there was another reason too: Vale didn’t kill because he liked it or felt compelled to, but because it suited him, and it helped him. Was it so far-fetched to suggest that he might have kept the clothes for some other reason? Not as trophies, perhaps, but as reminders about the risks that came with living a life entirely built on a fiction.

One thing became obvious, though: the mud-spattered exercise gear I’d found in the box, the dresses and blouses, trousers and shoes, were all that remained of a business rival he’d had in the 1990s who had begun to get suspicious of him; a journalist who asked the wrong questions in 2002; and a man at the Foreign Office who saw something in Robert Zaid that wasn’t quite right – all of them buried in the forest, alongside nine innocent people from Yorkshire.