‘We came here once with the kids,’ Healy said, the distance in his voice instantly bringing me back, its timbre laced with the anguish of events long past. He was looking at a picture of Black Gale. ‘I mean, not here, but the Yorkshire Dales. We stayed at some place near Malham Cove.’ Another smile, there and gone again. ‘Leanne was always easy; she’d just go along with whatever Gemma and I decided. But the boys …’ He made a noise through his teeth: amused, then more emotional. ‘All they did all week was whine. Every walk, every place we took them.’

I watched him for a moment, the dull light of the room reflected in his eyes. There was no animosity in his voice. Just sadness because of what came after, the things he’d lost.

The family.

‘I wish I could come with you,’ Healy said.

It was hard to remain silent, harder still to insist that he didn’t, but that the best place for him was right here, inside a room booked in a false name, where no one would remember him or ask questions about who he was. When a man wasn’t supposed to exist, you risked absolutely everything even by driving into the middle of nowhere.

Even so, it hurt me to deny him the chance; if it wasn’t for Healy, we wouldn’t have ever got this far. Before he was forced to relocate, in his evenings, at weekends, alone inside my parents’ old cottage, with no access to the Internet, he’d spent the money that he’d earned on the trawler paying for photocopies and books, and on bus tickets to the local library. There, he’d kept his sanity by reading newspapers, using their computers to get online, even sitting at ancient microfiche readers, in order to study old, unsolved cases. That was where he’d found this one. If the world hadn’t believed him dead, this would have been the sort of case he would have worked. Instead, he’d called me, telling me to look into it, knowing the whole time that – whatever contribution he made – he’d always exist in the shadows.

I’d brought a backpack with me from the car and, as I looked at the walls again, reminding myself of the timeline that Healy had constructed of what had happened out at Black Gale two and a half years ago, I handed him the bag.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, taking it from me.

‘A printout of the police investigation. One of my old sources at the Met mailed it over to me, but it just came through this morning so I haven’t had a chance to look at it properly.’

He unzipped the bag, pulling out a stack of paper.

‘I thought you could go over it while I’m out,’ I said.