He stopped and looked up, one of the pictures – a shot of a valley, a woodland in its cleft, the sky a deep, vivid mauve – pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

‘We forget it and move on,’ he said.

‘You don’t think there’s anything in it?’

‘In a guy going out with a camera and taking pictures of the countryside?’ He placed the photo on to the pile. ‘It’s like Chris Gibbs being a gambler, or no one knowing anything about Randolph and Emiline, or Mark Gibbs being “obsessed” with some girl he went to school with. None of it means anything until we can prove that it does.’ Healy held up my phone so I could see what he was looking at: onscreen was the website for one of the red-top tabloids and the story that Tori had been referring to: GHOST HOUSE KID ‘STALKED’ INSTAGRAM GIRL.

‘“Stalked”. Is that in any way accurate?’

‘Not based on what’s in the story. He was “obsessed” with her because he wrote three separate comments under one photograph she posted.’ Healy checked the story again. ‘First comment: “You look hot.” Second comment: “Do you still live in Skipton?” Third comment: “How are your family doing?”’ Healy shrugged. ‘She didn’t reply to any of the comments.’

He threw me the phone and I started going through the story. On the surface there was nothing in it. There was nothing in Patrick going out to take photos either, or in Chris’s history as an alleged gambler. But when you were looking for missing people, the answers were rarely, if ever, bobbing around on the surface.

The truth was never in the shallows.

It was always somewhere much deeper.

10

We called it a night.

I went downstairs to reception and booked a second room, next door to Healy, and then began the process of taking the computers and tablets upstairs. That meant the hard drive and tower from the Perrys’, laptops belonging to both Mark Gibbs and Randolph Solomon, and the iPads that had been on Laura Gibbs’s bedside table and in John and Freda Davey’s home. Healy didn’t argue – computers had never really been his strong point as an investigator, technology had moved on since he was at the Met, and he’d always been more effective in the field, anyway – so we’d make more headway if I did a first sweep of them in the morning. In reality, though, I didn’t expect to find much: if all the tech had already been released from evidence, that was normally a fair indication of its worth.