That was possible too, but Halloween night still felt more likely: their phones were off from ten that night, and none of the alarms had been set, so it seemed like they’d gone to the dinner party expecting to return to their homes at the evening’s end. If they’d known what was coming – if they’d known that they’d be away from the village for days, weeks, months – they’d have surely set the alarms. The fact that they didn’t seemed to suggest that something had interrupted them that night. The question was what – or who?

‘Does this smell like an inside job to you?’

Healy glanced at me, but not in surprise at the question. It had been on my mind from the second I’d first started looking into the case and I could see he’d been considering it too.

‘It would explain why there are no other footprints,’ I went on, studying the same photos, ‘and it explains the lack of suspicious tyre tracks. Chris Gibbs had a Land Rover, the Daveys had that Porsche SUV, and Randolph and Emiline a camper van. They’re all big cars, capable of ferrying around lots of people at once.’

He shrugged. ‘There could be something in it.’

‘But?’

‘But which of the villagers had the motivation?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the same one – or ones – who had the motivation to take the camper van and make it disappear.’

‘Randolph and Emiline, you mean?’

‘Not necessarily. I mean, it’s their vehicle but it wouldn’t have been hard for someone else in the village to gain access to it.’

I looked at my notes, at the names of the villagers, at the possible suspects – and the possible reasons – why one or more of them would have taken the Volkswagen. There was little of substance about the missing vehicle in the police file, only that the cops had looked for it and gone through the same thought processes we just had. Ultimately, it was another line of enquiry that had hit a dead end.

I looked at the villagers’ jobs again, trying to seek my answers there. Patrick was running a PR firm and Francesca Perry was a nurse in Cumbria. John and Freda Davey were both retired. The Gibbses ran a farm and their son was at college. And Randolph and Emiline were retired and worked part-time at a library respectively. Nothing rang alarm bells in terms of their employment, so – if I was going to run with the idea any further, or make any sort of connection from them back to the unaccounted-for camper van – I’d have to dig down into who they were as people.

‘Here’s something else,’ Healy said, bringing a page of phone records towards him. ‘Why bother taking wallets and mobiles if they had no intention of using them?’

‘Maybe they did intend to use them.’