At the drystone wall, I took the east–west trail, the route much flatter as it followed a tiny stream towards a braid of peaks. After half a mile of going west, I double-backed on myself, came up and around the edge of the village and entered through the main gate. As I did, I saw Healy moving from the Perrys’ house to the one next door – the Daveys’ – writing something down as he walked.

‘Find anything?’ I asked once I’d reached him.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing so far. You?’

‘No. There’s a good meeting spot down there, though.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Only twenty minutes away, but properly isolated.’

He looked towards the valley.

‘You really think he was having an affair with Freda or Emiline?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, because we didn’t.

I worked in the opposite direction to him, starting with the farm, then Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson’s, then John and Freda Davey’s house, and finally Patrick and Francesca Perry’s. In each of them, I emptied out drawers and went through wardrobes and cupboards, ensuring I hadn’t missed anything, but by the time I returned to the Perrys’ hallway, the smell of the plug-in strong in the air, I’d found nothing.

‘No luck?’ Healy said, meeting me outside.

‘No. You?’

He shook his head.

I glanced at Randolph and Emiline’s place.

‘You didn’t get anywhere tracing that missing camper van?’

‘No,’ Healy said. ‘Total dead end, just like Tori Gibbs said.’

So where was it?

I looked at the other cars and then at the single empty driveway.

‘We should probably go,’ I said.

He didn’t respond, because it was obvious he was reluctant to. He liked being out here, even if he hadn’t found anything, because it wasn’t the confines of the hotel we were in, or the hotel he’d been forced to flee to in Newcastle before that, or the house he’d rarely left down in Devon. This was freedom of a sort: a wide open space where he didn’t have to look over his shoulder the whole time; perhaps more than that, a place where he could think like a cop again.

I gave him a moment and headed back to the car.

A few minutes later, we left, cloud beginning to build, the sun drifting in and out of view as we headed south to the B road. Healy talked to me as we drove, and I listened to enough of it to respond to his ideas, his theories, ways in which we could push forward on the case – but in the puddles on the road, in the dew-soaked grass on either bank, I also found a repetition that helped me forge a separate path in my own thoughts, back to the moorland I’d walked, to all the unanswered questions.

It meant I was seeing the road, but I wasn’t concentrating on it.