‘But the phones didn’t come on after Halloween night and there’s been nothing since,’ he went on, ‘not even a minor blip on the radar. I looked at the phone records here. They only cover the two weeks before everyone went missing, but I can’t see much to get excited about. We’d be looking for calls to strange numbers, repeated calls to the same number, that sort of thing, but there’s nothing like that here. No issues on Internet activity either: the Gibbs kid is the only one who seemed to use his phone for actually going on websites, and that seems to be a mix of video games and porn. I mean, he was a teenage boy – that’s pretty standard, right?’ He checked the printouts again. ‘The others used a few apps here and there, but it’s mostly uninteresting and expected: Mail, WhatsApp, some news feeds – and Patrick Perry used Twitter and Instagram.’

‘Anything on them?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So maybe we need to go back further than a fortnight. Two weeks doesn’t give us much of an overview. I’ve got a guy I can ask.’

He nodded, knowing not to press further. I had sources from my newspaper days that I still used, but I never discussed their identity with anyone, not even Healy.

I gestured to some of the paperwork he still held in his hands. ‘Ross said that Chris Gibbs made almost seven figures from the building and sale of those houses.’

Healy nodded. ‘So you think this could be about money?’

Our eyes both shifted to a photocopy of a tabloid story – run a couple of days after the villagers went missing – that we’d pinned to the wall. The newspaper had managed to locate a friend of Laura Gibbs who claimed that, five or six years before he vanished, Chris had started to ‘get a taste for gambling’. In the same article, Tori Gibbs – Chris’s sister – completely disregarded this statement, calling it a lie, but the friend – who wanted to remain anonymous – said Laura had told her in confidence that no one else, not even Tori, knew about Chris’s ‘demons’, and said she had only come forward because she wondered whether the gambling had something to do with what happened at Black Gale. Could Chris have owed someone money?

And did the other villagers get caught in the crossfire?

‘There’s no evidence to support what’s on the wall there,’ Healy said, taking another bite of his cheeseburger. ‘If Chris was a gambler, I can’t see it in these financials.’

‘So what did he do with all the money he made from the houses?’

Healy leafed through the police file.