‘And that was how he got away with it,’ Tori said, the two of us leaning against the drystone walls that surrounded Black Gale. I just nodded, because she was talking to me about a man she’d read about and researched, not a man she’d encountered in the flesh. In her voice, I heard a weird mix of disgust and reverence, the confliction between a woman grieving the lost lives of her brother, sister-in-law and nephew, and the journalist trying to write about them. I didn’t blame her necessarily, because when someone you loved died, there was no right way to deal with it, but what I knew for sure was this: Tori hadn’t stood opposite him. She hadn’t seen the man Adrian Vale was. She could never fully understand the scale of what he’d done to Jo, to me, to all the others that he abducted and flew to that forest.

To her, he wasn’t real, he was just someone built from things the police told her as a relative, and ideas she’d read, heard and researched herself.

If he’d been real to her, she wouldn’t be writing about him.

If he’d been real to her, she wouldn’t have ever slept again.

72

Beatrix Steards’s body was recovered from the Chiltern Hills. It was left in a small but dense wooded area, close to a river, and when I saw shots of the grave site, it was hard not to see the similarities between the place that Adrian Vale had put Beatrix thirty-one years ago, and the place in which he’d put everyone else in the time since.

There was no one left to mourn for her.

Not properly.

Dave and Mira Steards, the couple who’d brought her up, died three years after she vanished, killed in a car accident on the road between their home in Woking and the nature reserve where they used to take Beatrix when she was a little girl. Her gravestone was placed next to theirs, in a cemetery on the edge of the town, but it was an ending much less than she deserved, much less than any of them deserved, and it had come three decades too late. It had come too late for Freda Davey too, the person – along with Patrick Perry – who had begun splintering the foundations of Beatrix’s disappearance, the structure that Adrian Vale had built and kept intact from the night he drove Beatrix out of London, deep into woodland, and found a grave for her in a tree.