I glanced at the wall we’d set up, the cascade of paper shivering as the air from the heating vent whispered across it. I’d pinned up some of the pictures I’d taken from the houses, photographs of the four households, on holidays, at home, living out their lives with no idea of what was coming down the line. In among them was another shot of them all – this time without their masks – gathered around the Gibbses’ table. Freda Davey in a floral dress. Emiline Wilson in a red one with blue trim. Chris and Patrick in jeans, Patrick with a green V-neck sweater, Chris in a checked shirt. Randolph in cords and a pair of polished brogues, his right foot inching out from behind a table leg. Everything looked so normal.

But it wasn’t normal.

Nothing was normal.

The more of them that were missing, the easier they should have been to find, because nine people meant nine potential trails. Instead, the case was constricting, closing itself off, the trails vanishing. Black Gale had started out as one of the strangest disappearances I’d ever come across.

Now I could sense it turning into something else.

Something much more unsettling.

8

Just after 9 p.m., I video-called Rina Blake and Tori Gibbs.

I’d already talked to both of them before leaving London, but we’d only covered the basics. Rina – John and Freda Davey’s daughter – lived in Cambridge and was currently six weeks into maternity leave after the birth of her second child; Tori, Chris Gibbs’s sister, was down in Deptford, and wrote about politics for the news website FeedMe. When we talked, the two women admitted they’d grown close since the disappearances, and because they were only a fifty-minute train ride apart would often meet up, primarily for Tori to give Rina updates about the case: Tori admitted she’d always had an interest in true crime and was now using that to try and spearhead her own search in her spare time into what happened at Black Gale.

It would have been easy to be cynical about that last part – especially because, if she’d found anything in the last two and a half years that was in any way useful, the search wouldn’t still be in deep freeze – but I chose to see it as an opportunity: if it turned out Tori had anything I could use, that was a bonus; if she didn’t, I hadn’t lost anything. And, anyway, her efforts were driven entirely by the same things that drove me.

Unanswered questions.

The pain of grief.

The people she’d loved.

I’d decided to split the calls, talking to Rina first, then Tori, then both of them together, and when Rina came on, she was in a low-lit living room, with a floor lamp beside her. It was quiet apart from the occasional crackle from a baby monitor.