‘I don’t know what we’ll do if he’s not one of these men. Back to CCTV from the quayside, I guess, see if there is anything. There must be something we are missing.’

Adrian looked through the faces one more time, thinking about the faces he had already discarded. Who was going to look for them? The idea that every single one of those people had someone who cared about them enough to notice they were gone, to report them missing, was distressing. Growing up with an addict for a father meant Adrian was no stranger to living with someone who was in and out of your life. Charlie Miles came and went as he pleased, and they never reported him missing. Maybe it was the same for some of these people.

He couldn’t get bogged down in what their stories might be, though. They might not all be sad stories. The truth was, he didn’t know and it was no use speculating; he couldn’t think about them right now. They weren’t all dead – some were probably homeless, some may have just felt suffocated in their lives and needed a new start elsewhere. It was common for people to disappear after a bad break-up. Sometimes the police would track them down and the missing person wouldn’t want to be found; it was their right to leave in the first place. Occasionally, they were fleeing abusive situations.

Adrian couldn’t imagine that, just dropping everything and moving away, but then he had his son, Tom, to think about, so he was tethered. Even when things had got really rough with his ex – Tom’s mum, Andrea – Adrian wouldn’t have thought about leaving; it didn’t even occur to him.

A notification sounded on Gary’s personal laptop and he rushed back over to the seat next to Adrian with it under his arm. Within seconds, Gary had the image on the screen of the reconstructed face.

The man looked quite young. He had the slender, angular face of a man under thirty. His cheekbones were prominent and he had a fairly square jaw. He didn’t quite have superhero looks, but there was something so everyday and inoffensive about him. Even Adrian could see that he was a decent-looking guy, the right side of average, symmetrical in all the right places.