The most used piece of tech was Mark Gibbs’s, but only because his laptop was powerful enough to run computer games, which he seemed to have sunk hours into. He used the Internet a lot, as a nineteen-year-old would be expected to, but nothing in his browsing habits rang any particular alarm bells. Chrome had remembered his passwords for both Facebook and Instagram, though he obviously hadn’t been on either for two and a half years, and all his notifications were from friends of his. I went back through some of his posts to see if anything stood out, or if any comments rankled, but he uploaded rarely and posted even less. One of his friends had created a ‘Find Mark Gibbs’ account on Instagram and Twitter, posting pictures of him; a few had DM’d him directly on Facebook in the immediate aftermath of his vanishing, begging him to come home. I took down their names. There were a few similar messages in the email accounts of the Daveys and the Gibbses too, from friends and family. A week after her parents had vanished, Rina had sent John and Freda Davey an email begging them to get in touch.

I love you both so much, she’d written. Please, please call.

My eyes lingered on that second part, feeling the emotion in it.

Eventually, I started examining the Perrys’ PC.

Tearing the evidence bag off the hard drive, I set up the tower next to the TV, clicked the hard drive into one of the bays on the reverse and used an HDMI cable to connect the PC to the hotel room’s TV. It took a couple of seconds for the TV to work out what was going on, but before long I had an image of the PC’s desktop onscreen.