The story went on for another couple of paragraphs and included quotes from the store owner about how thankful he was for Mills’s help, as well as from two senior officers – one from West Yorkshire Police, where the crime had taken place, and the other from the Lancashire Constabulary, where Mills worked in an MIT – who said they were putting Mills forward for an award. I read the story again, and then a third time, and by the end I was still unsure exactly what to make of it. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find on Isaac Mills, and neither the picture of him in the paper or the quotes he’d given quite tallied with the man I’d met at Black Gale, or the man Tasker had described to me over the phone. Outside the farmhouse he’d been cold, withdrawn and guarded; Tasker had suggested he might have been introverted. In the article, in the photograph of him smiling broadly for the camera, he wasn’t that man at all. He was a courageous off-duty cop, a gallant community hero, warm and apparently sociable.

So was he both?

Or was one of them an act?

I saved all the pictures of him to the desktop and then went back to Google. There were no more answers when I used both ‘Isaac Mills’ and ‘Seiger and Sten’ as keywords, but on the law firm’s own website I discovered that their one and only office was in the heart of York, at an address off the Shambles. I’d only been to York once, but I remembered the Shambles: narrow and cobbled, it was one of the city’s most famous streets, a tourist trap packed with beautifully preserved, uneven timber-framed buildings that dated back to Elizabethan times. When I switched to Street View, trying to seek out an actual image of the company’s unit, I quickly hit a dead end: the firm was based in a doorway-sized lane, between a sweet shop and a café, and the lane wasn’t mapped. All I could see of it on my screen was a slender, gloomy artery, an overhanging upper floor, and a pale green sign with gold lettering.