Again, it showed just how confident Vale was, how audacious, how skilled as a liar, that he was able to convince the police. He spoke to them from Hong Kong, where he was attending a board meeting, and he offered them full access to his home and his office in London. He did that because, by that time, four weeks had already passed, and so memories of me were beginning to get sketchy among his staff. There was no record that any meeting had been officially scheduled with me, because he’d erased it from his systems, so while his PA remembered my call, the fact that my name wasn’t in Vale’s diary seemed to back up what he’d told the police about me never confirming. The two security guards who’d been there the night I went to his house didn’t know who I was because Vale had never told them, and his plans for me were part of the reason why he’d dismissed them so early that evening – so while they both vaguely recalled Zaid having a visitor, they couldn’t recall specifically on which night. Vale’s lie wasn’t watertight, but as long as I never came back from the forest alive, it was a lie that would hold perfectly well, and that was all he needed. He and Mills had cleaned his house down after I was there, wiping surfaces, erasing prints, scrubbing and scouring until there was no trace of me left. Vale disposed of any paperwork that might hurt him, as well as email trails, footage from surveillance cameras at his home, anything with a link back to me and Black Gale, which was exactly why he was so confident about letting the police come to his home and his business.

Except they never did.

It was the word of an anonymous caller who they couldn’t trace, and – despite appeals for him to come forward – wouldn’t come up for air, versus Robert Zaid, international businessman, an official in the UK government, a man who’d donated millions to charity, who’d built an entire cancer research facility. Zaid was a person people liked and responded to. After it all came out in the press, colleagues of his, the men and women he worked with, were profoundly shocked by what they discovered.

They never would have picked him as a killer.

He was so charming.

He was so benevolent and big-hearted.