As I looked again at the other two houses, and then back in the direction of the farm, I saw windows that were just as dark as the Perrys’ and gardens just as overgrown. That was what made the scale of this case so intimidating.

It wasn’t just the Perrys that had disappeared.

It was the whole village.

2

Before I’d met Ross Perry, I’d met someone else.

I’d arrived late at the drab motorway hotel where he was staying. The drive up from London had been bad, the journey pockmarked by constant roadworks, and as I crossed the empty car park, rain hammering against the tarmac, I glimpsed him at one of the windows, partially formed behind a white gauze curtain. He looked like a ghost, a shape drifting in and out of existence, and in some ways that was what he’d become; but this ghost was what had first got me interested in Black Gale.

His obsession had now become mine.

The foyer was unremarkable, the woman behind the counter uninterested in who I was and why I might be there. She never looked up, didn’t even move, her face washed white by the glow from her monitor. Bland music was being piped out of a speaker close to me, but mostly all I could hear above the rain and traffic was the intermittent sound of her fingers across the keyboard.

He was sitting halfway down a corridor housing a row of vending machines, holding a plastic cup of coffee, steam spiralling out of it. He had his legs crossed and, either because of the angle he was at, or because of the light, he appeared smaller than the last time I’d seen him. I tried to remember when that was and realized, despite talking to him on the phone four times a week, every week, for three and a half years, I hadn’t actually seen him in the flesh for thirteen months. Before today, we hadn’t had much choice: he’d been living off the grid in a fisherman’s cottage in south Devon that had once belonged to my parents and now belonged to me, and he’d been doing it in secret, and under the alias Bryan Kennedy. His real name was carved into a headstone in a cemetery in north London, and buried under the earth beneath was a body that was supposed to be his. It was all a lie. He’d faked his own death, I’d helped him do it, and if anyone ever found out the truth, we were both going to prison. So, in the time since, he’d steered clear of the Internet and mobile phones – anything that put him on the map – all of his bills paid by me because he didn’t have a bank account, and we’d agreed never to meet up unless it was absolutely necessary.