I turned on a light, sat down at the desk and began going through some of the photos I’d removed from the houses. Patrick and Francesca Perry, mid-hike, rolling hills beyond them. Chris, Laura and Mark Gibbs gathered around a table in a restaurant somewhere, smiling for the camera. John and Freda Davey in the same photo I’d seen earlier, on a cruise, Freda, in remission, small against her husband, John looking small too against the backdrop of the vast ship. And then Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson on their holiday in the States, the two of them pointing from either side of the photograph at the Hollywood sign way off in the distance. I thought again about all the things that could have led to nine people disappearing – an affair, a gambling debt, the awkward comments of a teenager on social media, the fact that two of the nine were much less known than the others – and then switched my attention to the computers and tablets. I’d planned to wait until the morning to tackle them all – but then I hadn’t banked on being awake at 2 a.m.

Once I started going through them, I quickly discovered that most had nothing useful to offer, but I got to know each person a little better: Randolph Solomon, the Middlesbrough fan, was into football in a big way generally, his web history showing repeated visits to an online fantasy league; his girlfriend, Emiline, as her job at the library suggested, was a big reader, as well as a keen gardener and landscaper, and she’d uploaded photographs of her work to a horticultural forum where she’d been an active member; Laura Gibbs was interested in interior design and had created a Pinterest page full of things she’d decorated and bought for the farm, and Chris’s hobbies lay in areas related to his job – machines, agriculture, countryside; John Davey wasn’t only a big rugby league fan, he was into cricket too, and played golf a couple of times a week; and Freda would often use the web to go to running forums – which echoed what Rina Blake had told me about her mother being a gifted athlete – where she’d read about marathons and trail running, about routes people had found and places she’d maybe still dreamed of trying for herself one day, however unlikely it may have seemed. She also spent a lot of time on travel websites, including plotting the locations in Australia where she wanted to go on her dream holiday.