‘Did Francesca ever go with Patrick?’

‘Well, that’s the other thing. I think that’s what caught Laura’s attention. He’d head out on to the moors without his wife, and he’d often do it first thing in the morning, or early evening, when the sun wasn’t properly up yet or it was just about to set – like he didn’t want anyone to see him.’

‘But Francesca must have noticed his absence?’

‘She worked over at Westmorland Hospital in Kendal – she was a senior nurse there – so she always did irregular hours, shift work, all that.’ Tori paused. ‘This is just what Laura said to me. I don’t know a lot about the Perrys, really. But Laura said Patrick was a good-looking guy, charming – not that that means anything, but you know …’ Even unspoken, it was clear to her that Patrick being attractive did mean something. ‘Anyway, point is, he would only go out like that when his wife was working. Whenever she was home they’d go out together, and when it was the two of them they’d have all the right equipment: the shoes, the coats, the backpacks. When it was just him, that was when it was different.’

As Patrick and Francesca Perry stared back at me from the wall, I thought of something Ross had said to me earlier: Even after so many years of being married, they never lost that spark. They just loved spending time together.

So where could Patrick have been going when he was on his own?

Sneaking around like that, if that was even what he was doing, and especially going out so unprepared for a hike, would normally lead to an obvious conclusion: he was going to meet someone; he’d established a relationship in secret, an affair. It happened, even within a successful marriage. But why head out the back, where there were no roads and the moorland went on for miles? Other than the main track in and out of the village, Black Gale’s surroundings were a knotty sprawl of fields, woodland and valleys, not particularly easy to navigate, and the nearest village was a good fifty-minute walk away. Laura Gibbs had told Tori he’d gone and come back inside an hour. There was a sporadic network of narrow back roads, all of which had passing areas, which meant waiting points for a car and whoever he might have been meeting, but it seemed like a lot of unnecessary hassle: if Francesca was at work and he really was having an affair, why wouldn’t Patrick just jump in his own car and drive to where he needed to go?

Could he have been meeting someone else from Black Gale?