‘You won’t find anything. It’s like it vanished, the same as Chris and Laura, the same as all of them. It wasn’t sold on to anyone, there was no SORN declaration made, so if it’s off-road somewhere, it’s being kept that way illegally. It’s a total dead end. The police couldn’t find it – and neither could I.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘leave it with me.’

We talked about the chronology of the house moves – the Perrys were first in, then Randolph and Emiline a month later, then the Daveys a month after that – and then I dialled Rina’s number again and began a conversation between the three of us. It was obvious the two women were comfortable with each other.

‘When was the last time you talked to your brother?’ I asked Tori.

‘That would have been by text three or four days before Halloween, but I spoke to Laura on the phone on the 30th of October, because I was going to this house party in Peckham and I wanted to get a cheesecake recipe from her. Laura was great at all that sort of thing. She was really artsy and creative, a talented cook.’ Tori paused, taking a long breath. ‘Laura was never just a sister-in-law to me. She was a sister. I used to talk on the phone to her more often than to Chris.’

‘And you didn’t get the sense that anything was wrong?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘What about with Mark?’

‘No,’ she said again, even more decisive this time. ‘Like I said, he was a good kid; a little awkward sometimes – your typical teenage boy – but he was polite and sensible, and he loved his mum and dad. Especially his dad. There were only two things Mark wanted to do after he finished school – be a farmer like Chris, and play video games.’

Things petered out after that, so I thanked them and waited for their video windows to snap to black. Rina leaned forward, grabbed her mouse and disappeared.

But Tori didn’t.

‘Is everything all right?’ I asked her.

She’d moved back a little and I could make out more of the background: right angles and blocks of light on the Isle of Dogs, and then the distant towers of Canary Wharf.

‘Tori?’

‘I didn’t want to mention it in front of Rina,’ she said quietly, not looking into the camera, as if she felt guilty about what she wanted to say. ‘I’m not sure if I should mention it at all, in fact, which is why I never said anything when we talked before. I mean, it’s probably nothing and I’ve never been able to prove it one way or another, anyway.’ She looked up now. ‘I deal in facts. Gossip and rumours, I hate all that shit.’

She stopped.