Fleet was watching for some reaction when he mentioned Lance’s name, but Richardson didn’t so much as twitch.

‘Of course I do,’ he said.

‘And these games you mention. Do you mean games like the one you were playing at the time Ben went missing? Hide-and-seek, I believe. Is that right? Would you be able to talk me through it?’

It was an easy opening, and Richardson clearly couldn’t resist. ‘It really is quite straightforward, Detective Inspector. One person hides and the other people try to find them.’

Fleet ignored the sarcasm. ‘I would have thought a group of fifteen-year-old kids would have been a bit beyond playing hide-and-seek.’

Richardson shrugged. ‘What can I tell you? It was boarding school. We had to find something to do.’ He paused for a moment, then added, ‘If you didn’t want to die of boredom, you needed to make your own fun.’

‘So Ben was the one hiding? And the rest of you were looking for him? You, Melissa and Lance? I have to say, that sounds less like a game to me – more like a hunt. In the version I remember playing, everybody hid, and only one person started off looking for them.’

Another shrug. ‘Call it what you like. It doesn’t really matter. Because as you know, we never found him.’

‘Where exactly were you looking for him?’

‘We’d agreed to stick to the southern section of the campus, and the woods were the best place to hide, so for the most part we searched for Ben there. From what I recall we started off at the lake.’

There was a small lake where the woods on the campus were at their thickest, Fleet knew. At first, when fears for Ben’s safety were at their height, there was a suspicion he might have accidentally drowned. But it had taken a pair of divers barely half a day to search the shallow water, and they’d found nothing connected to Ben except a pair of his old trainers. One of his dorm mates later confessed to having thrown them in there several weeks earlier – as a joke, he claimed, which investigators at the time had taken as proof that Ben was being bullied, increasing the likelihood in their minds that he had run away.

Fleet checked his notes. ‘You claimed in your original statement that you left the main building with the others, including Ben, at around two-thirty p.m. None of you were seen all afternoon, until you, Melissa and Lance were spotted near the entrance to the main building at just before six p.m.’

‘If you say so, Detective Inspector. I don’t recall the precise timings.’

‘At what point did Ben disappear?’

‘The last we saw of him was when he went off to hide. So a count of sixty after we reached the lake.’