‘I’m helping the families.’

‘Helping them.’ He nodded once and looked at the Audi again. ‘Helping them how?’

‘By trying to find them.’

‘I see,’ he said for a second time, but there was a flicker in his eyes that didn’t quite conform with his expression, and I started to realize something.

He’d never asked for my name.

He took a step closer to me. ‘And how’s that going?’

‘It’s early days.’

‘Of course.’

His words suggested a measure of sympathy for the complexities of a missing persons investigation, especially one on this scale, but again his eyes shifted briefly to the upstairs windows and I wondered if he knew for sure that I wasn’t here alone. The thought made me nervous.

‘Well, I’d better be going,’ he said finally.

But he didn’t go.

He stayed where he was and carried on looking at me.

‘I didn’t catch your name. Mr …?’

‘Raker.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

If I’d been willing to believe he had no idea who I was, I might have considered it an odd response. But I didn’t. Because this was exactly what I’d seen in his face all along – the dissonance in his expression, the movement in his eyes. This was why he’d never asked for my name until now.

Because he already knew who I was.

He’d known all about me before he ever turned up here.

17

Isaac Mills headed away from me, back along the track.

Halfway up, he glanced over his shoulder and I wondered if he was trying to work out how long I’d been watching him before he discovered I was here. He looked a second time as he got to the apex of the road, where the Black Gale sign stood.

Then he was gone.

I immediately broke into a run. My neck hurt, my shoulders, the bruising across my chest, but I ignored all of it and headed after him. As I got to the wall beside the sign, I slowed, dropping to a crouch and moving in against it, using a break in the stones to peer through to the other side. His car was parked forty feet down the slope, in a natural lay-by. It was a dark blue Lexus. He’d started up the engine – a low rumble against the relative stillness of the moors – and was on his phone.

I took a photo of the car, zooming in on his registration plate, and by the time I was done he’d finished his phone call and was pulling the car out. The brake lights winked as he snapped the handbrake off, and I heard the dull sound of the radio being turned up. After that, he hit the accelerator.