While I was outside at the car, I also put in a call to the old newspaper source I’d mentioned to Healy. His name was Spike. He was a hacker, hidden away at an address he’d never given me, using a name that wasn’t his. We’d never met in all the time we’d known each other, and when I paid him, I left the cash in a locker at a sports centre close to where I lived. But when it came to getting beyond firewalls and never leaving a trace, Spike was the best there was. I asked him to get me the mobile phone records for the nine Black Gale residents, starting two months before they vanished. The police had only gone back a fortnight.

‘Wow,’ he said, ‘that’s a big job.’

‘Yeah, I know. Reckon you can handle it?’

‘Ha ha. This is me you’re talking to. You want landlines as well?’

‘Yeah, across the same period of time.’

‘What about after they disappeared?’

‘None of the handsets have been used since 31 October 2015, so I don’t think there’ll be calls into or out of them after that – but if you see anything, let me know.’

I hung up and headed back to the room.

As I was letting myself in, my phone sprang into life again. I expected it to be Spike with a question he’d forgotten to ask, but instead it was my daughter, Annabel.

I pushed the door shut and hit Answer.

‘Hey, sweetheart.’

‘Hey, how are you?’

‘I’m good. How was your day?’

‘Not bad,’ she said, although she sounded tired. I’d only known her for around five years, her entire existence kept secret from me – and mine from her – until she turned twenty-four. But while I sometimes worried that we’d never capture the bond that flourished and matured between a father and daughter, I knew enough about her now to pick up on the things that were concerning her. Often, she would try to hide those things from me because she believed they were unimportant when compared to what I dealt with in my work. But they were never unimportant to me. Those things were everything I’d missed for twenty-four years.

‘Is Liv okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, we’re both fine.’

She lived with her thirteen-year-old sister, Olivia, in the house in south Devon that they’d grown up in; a house that had been left to them by the people Annabel had – for nearly a quarter of a century – believed were her parents. Biologically, Liv wasn’t mine, but it had never felt that way: I treated her exactly the same way as I treated Annabel.

‘So what’s up?’ I said.

‘I think I might have done something I shouldn’t have.’

I pulled a chair out and sat down.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I messed up before school this morning.’

Annabel was a teacher.

‘Messed up how?’