It was tidy, a series of applications in three vertical lines on the left. Most were of little or no relevance, except for Firefox. I clicked on the icon and then went to History. The last Internet activity was at the end of November 2015, a month after the disappearances at Black Gale. But there was nothing suspicious about that: it was a forensic tech. They’d been back over the same websites that Patrick Perry had been looking at before he vanished. I checked his email, which automatically opened at start-up, and then moved the cursor to the bottom left and selected File Explorer. Soon, it became a cycle of repetition: Powerpoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, invoices, pitches he’d made, letters on headed notepaper, the same stuff duplicated over and over. I also found folders full of photographs – landscapes, hills, valleys, the village at sunset and sunrise. Was this the evidence that finally proved his trips to the moors – witnessed by Laura Gibbs – were genuinely to take pictures and not for some other purpose? One thing was for certain: not a single document even remotely suggested something illicit had been going on between Patrick and anyone else.

Drained, I got up and went back to bed, crawling beneath the duvet again. The mattress was lumpy, cold, two singles pushed together with a ridge along the centre where they met. I tried to still my thoughts, and slowly I began to drift, images of Black Gale – of nine untold stories – giving way to fatigue.

Silence. Darkness.

And then a sound from the corridor.

I got up again and went to the door, opening it. There was no sign of anybody outside. Halfway between my room and the lift was a skylight, reduced to a square of blackness now: the rain was making a machine-gun sound against it, harsh, forceful, like pebbles scattering.

Had that been the noise I’d heard?

I paused there for a moment, holding the door open with one hand, and then grabbed my keycard, let the door click shut behind me and went to Healy’s room. I stood there, listening for a while, and then heard it again: the same noise as before.

It took me a couple of seconds to place it.

And, once I did, my heart dropped.

Inside his room, Healy was crying.

12

He opened the door halfway.

He was dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, but it was clear that the delay in answering had been because he’d tried to clean himself up. There were still beads of water on his cheeks where he’d washed his face, droplets in his beard too, and he was standing straighter, more upright than normal, as if he were trying to offset some of the sadness. It was an act that he barely seemed to have the energy for.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, despite seeing the answer.