‘It could mean a couple of things,’ I replied. ‘Either they all piled into the back of the missing camper van and left voluntarily – or it wasn’t so voluntary.’

‘You’re talking about it being an inside job?’

I glanced at Healy. We’d discussed the same thing earlier.

‘I think we have to consider it,’ I said.

‘What about Randolph and Emiline?’

‘What about them?’

‘No one knows anything about them.’

‘That’s not entirely true.’

‘But it’s almost true,’ she said, and then stopped herself, frowning. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t … Look, I didn’t mean to accuse them of …’ She sighed. ‘You know, the crazy thing is, I’ve spent five years standing up to politicians, holding them to account, picking apart their lies and skewering them on our website, and I’ve become pretty bloody good at what I do. But what happened to Chris and Laura, to Mark, to all the others, it’s the first time I’ve ever felt uncertain of myself.’ She paused again. ‘I guess what I mean is that, when it comes to Randolph and Emiline, everything’s just less … clear.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Asking around, even among friends of theirs, it’s like you get a surface sheen of detail but, when you dig a little deeper, no one really, properly, knows them.’

‘Okay,’ I said. I was being deliberately non-committal, because I didn’t want to accuse Randolph and Emiline of anything ahead of the facts. They had no family and no kids – they’d left their house to charity in their wills – and the majority of the time, families were how the most lucid memories of someone were built. They were also the connections that, quite often, maintained the entire momentum of a missing persons search. So I was less concerned that their friends didn’t know every detail of their lives – or that, unlike the other residents of Black Gale, they appeared, on the surface, more opaque – and more bothered by the fact that theirs was the only vehicle that was missing. That was evident, inarguable, and the longer it took for that camper van to resurface, and the villagers alongside it, the more it seeded doubts about who Randolph and Emiline were.

Out of interest, I asked Tori what she made of the missing vehicle.

‘It’s pretty bloody weird, that’s what I make of it. I mean, it was the only vehicle that wasn’t there the day Ross turned up at the village.’ She opened out her hands, a gesture that said everything about Randolph and Emiline that I’d just been thinking myself. ‘Have you got any leads on it?’

‘Not yet.’ I glanced at Healy again. ‘I’ve got someone trying to trace it.’