I looked at the walls.

He’d moved aside a desk, the TV, a corner table and chair. He’d taken down a painting. In its place, he’d filled the entire wall, every inch of it: tacked-up photocopies, pictures, printouts, a cascade of paper, of headlines and handwritten notes that meant nothing to anyone except us. This was no one else’s obsession but ours.

At the top, on hotel stationery, was a title for it all.

Black Gale.

When he’d first floated the idea of looking into what happened at the village, I’d said no. I’d said no a month later when he tried again, even though I knew he was going stir-crazy stuck in a hotel room in the north-east; he’d moved there from Devon as a safety measure when a journalist had started sniffing around my life. Eventually it dawned on me that giving Healy something to get his teeth into made sense, as it was then less likely that he would get careless, and at the time I’d taken ownership of all the information that was now pinned to the wall of this room. So as a peace offering, perhaps as an apology too, I’d couriered everything back to him in Newcastle in an effort to keep him focused, but also to send him a message: I still wasn’t ready to get involved. Missing people had always been my life, as essential to me as the blood in my veins, but my last case had almost killed me. I hadn’t felt ready for something on this scale, and the idea of working a case with Healy seemed a bad way of acclimatizing.

But that was just the problem: when something was in your blood you could never really get rid of it. I could deny it for a while – or try to – but the compulsion would always remain. So when we’d talked on the phone three nights ago and he’d mentioned Black Gale again, this time I let him tell me about it. I put the phone down afterwards and went looking myself. And then the next day I woke up and I realized something: this job had nearly destroyed me before, but it had saved me as well. It had brought me out of the darkness after my wife had died. It had given me focus, and maintained me, and taught me how to live. It was like breath.

It was how I felt normal.