Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Healy, a pen still clamped between thumb and forefinger, turn around at the desk and shift forward, eyes glued to my laptop.

‘It’s fine,’ I assured her. ‘What is it you want to say?’

‘It’s about Patrick Perry,’ she said.

9

I glanced back at the wall, at the photos of Patrick and Francesca Perry.

‘What about Patrick?’ I asked.

‘It might be nothing,’ Tori said, and began moving in her chair, shifting from side to side: she was hesitant, obviously still conflicted about whether she should say anything. ‘It’s why I haven’t mentioned this to Rina, and especially to Ross, because I don’t want to make a big deal if it’s nothing. I don’t want to be making accusations I can’t back up. I mean, he could have just been doing exactly what he claimed to be doing …’

I shifted closer to the laptop.

‘You’d better spell it out for me, Tori.’

‘Okay,’ she replied, the word pushed out with a sigh. ‘Okay, so like I said to you, it could be nothing at all, but I remember being on the phone to Laura a couple of months before they disappeared, and we were right in the middle of this conversation when she just stopped dead, like someone had interrupted her. I asked her if she was all right, and she was fine – she just said something odd was going on with one of her neighbours.’

Healy and I glanced at each other.

‘What did she mean by “odd”?’ I asked.

‘Patrick. He kept going for these walks out on the moors.’

I frowned. ‘As in hikes?’

‘That’s the thing: Laura didn’t know.’

‘So he could just have been going for a hike?’

‘He could have.’

‘But Laura didn’t think so?’

‘She said he never went out with a backpack, or in hiking shoes. He never bothered with a coat – and he was never gone longer than an hour.’

‘So he was going somewhere close by?’

She held out her hands. ‘I guess.’

‘And in which direction did he head?’

‘Out beyond the back of the farm, into the valley.’

‘Cross-country? Not out of the front, where the main gate into the village is?’

‘No,’ Tori said. ‘Out into the fields.’

‘Did Laura say how often this happened?’

‘I think she said it had happened about three or four times by then.’

‘So not very often at all?’

She could see what I was driving at: because she was so wedded to the idea of it being relevant now, it was hard for her to see how prosaic this revelation was. Three or four times, Patrick had gone out on the moors for an hour – so what?

‘But why wouldn’t he go out with any of the right gear?’ Tori asked. ‘No walking shoes, not even a coat. You don’t think that’s odd?’