‘She was much less career-orientated. She used to tell Ian and me that all she really wanted to be was a mum, and that any job she had would always be secondary to bringing us up. Mum didn’t work a lot, really, until the early nineties when Ian and I were both at secondary school. She was at the gas board for a while, and then for the last five or six years before she retired she was at Leeds council. Then they both called it a day, bought the house up at Black Gale, and the rest … it’s just …’ History. She blinked, trying to remain stoic. ‘Anyway, like I said, Mum wasn’t hugely driven in that way. I think, to be honest, she missed her true calling.’

‘Which was what?’

‘She was a brilliant runner in her twenties,’ Rina said, smiling. ‘She used to run marathons all over the place and clocked serious times. Even after she stopped competing, she still ran. She was still running in her fifties. She loved it, and she was bloody good at it too.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Healy writing something down, sitting out of view of the laptop’s camera.

‘What about Black Gale?’ I asked. ‘Did they like it there?’

‘They loved it.’

‘So no arguments or disagreements with the neighbours – even minor ones?’

‘No.’ Rina shrugged. The baby monitor blinked into life again, the soft sound of her son turning over in his crib. ‘They loved all the guys up there. Dad always used to say it was the best decision they ever made.’

I thanked her, told her I would call her back in half an hour, and then dialled Tori Gibbs’s number. She answered straight away, sitting in an armchair by a set of bookshelves, the lights of the Thames visible behind her. She was in her early fifties, with dark eyes and dark hair; she was also single, with no kids and no distractions other than her work, which must have been how she’d found the time to dig into the disappearances at Black Gale. Her interest in true crime was obvious too, her shelves packed with books about some of history’s most notorious killers. BTK. The Green River Killer. Jack the Ripper. Fred and Rosemary West. The Night Stalker.

We talked for a while about Chris and Laura Gibbs, about Mark too, and then I asked her about the story that had run in the newspapers concerning her brother.

‘That was total bullshit,’ she said.

‘He never had any problems with gambling?’