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Sam fills the small white kettle in the sink in the bathroom of his room at the Travellers’ Rest Hotel. Irritation flares as cold water sprays over the edge of the basin, splashing down his front. He empties two coffee sachets into the tiny cup and adds the now-boiling water, takes a sip and winces at the thin, bitter aftertaste, the synthetic milk. Only the very tip of his finger will fit through the cup handle to hold it, forcing his little finger to stick out.

Why is there a hotel here? he keeps thinking, looking round the room, with its terracotta walls and functional furniture, the duvet flat and thin. Who would come to Conley on holiday? Do that many people really come here on business? He hasn’t seen anyone else in the place yet, when he’s been outside his room, aside from staff.

Firing up his laptop, Sam loads the SomeoneMustKnow website. He’d heard a radio programme about it – a community of ‘armchair sleuths’ who sit at home and try to solve crimes. They specialise in long-unsolved murders and finding out who the Jane and John Does are – unidentified bodies that show up with no ID and no one looking for them. The piece was on the radio after the web community had managed to work out the identity of a woman, who’d been found dead on a deserted beach in America a few years ago, by tracing the origin of a small tattoo on her ankle.

After that radio show, Sam had lost hours on SomeoneMustKnow.com, falling down the rabbit hole of board after board, sub-thread upon sub-thread. Reams of facts and theories – not always distinguishable from each other – about dead bodies unclaimed; nobody missing them, or at least owning up to it. Mind-bending murders, impossible scenarios, with no convictions, no endings.

It was here where he had first heard about Victoria too. Hers seemed to be one of the few UK cases currently active on the site, and the name of Conley rang a bell. As Sam read more, he realised he remembered the case from when it had happened, but only faintly – the broad shapes but not the details. They’d probably run something on it at the paper – there’d have been a scramble to tie it to something local, however tenuous – although Sam knows he’d have remembered it if he’d written about it directly.

SomeoneMustKnow drew him because of his interest in true crime, but also because he was looking for something himself – his ‘one’ as he thought of it. When he’d heard about the website, he’d had an inkling that it would be a good place to find ‘his story’, the case he could cover. He’d felt guilty about it in some ways, not only about fishing around like that in someone else’s misery, but about the cases he hadn’t picked, too, like the dogs that get left behind at an animal home.

The threads about Victoria on SomeoneMustKnow had seemingly been dormant for a while, but had recently been revived by Victoria’s mother’s newspaper appeal and her appearance on the local news. A user called AaronInBetween had posted the video clip and article about the case, asking:

AaronInBetween: ‘Does anyone know much about this one? Strange no one has ever been caught?’

It was enough to stir the community’s interest.

Most of the posters list their location or a whimsical version of it. Aaron’s is listed under his posts as ‘Here, there and everywhere’.

Other posters quickly piled in:

PrincessPeaches91: I’d be looking at the family with this one. Mother and father. Grandparents?

Someone else posted an article about another unsolved case of a girl around Victoria’s age found in the river in Skipton a few years earlier, the next town along.

‘Linked?’ PrincessPeaches91 replies says. Sam imagines her wearing oversized glasses. Presumably ‘her’ anyway.

In another thread, user SeenTheLight has taken it upon themselves to search for Victoria’s missing locket, believing this to be a big key to the mystery.

SeenTheLight: My niece was looking for one of these necklaces because she saw a blogger she likes wearing one. They’re all over eBay in the UK.

Her profile says she lives in Arkansas. Again, Sam is assuming SeenTheLight is a woman but, looking over the profile again, there’s nothing to confirm – or even really suggest – that. The profile picture is a sunset somewhere unidentifiable.

Sam has developed a mental picture of most of the posters now from scrolling through their history on the site. In his mind, SeenTheLight is overweight, late fifties. Curly hair. She has a wooden porch out front of her house. AaronInBetween is a college kid. Skinny, with hair that sticks out from under a baseball cap. Still lives at home.

Sam thinks back to what he’s read about Victoria’s case, the information Judith has given him – the little that the police would release to her. She said they told her much of it couldn’t be made available as it could jeopardise the legal case, should there ever be one. He had to wonder if they just said that to give Judith the impression that a legal case was still a remote possibility.

When Victoria was found in the lake, she had a severe head injury. Although there was no bleeding externally, there was a massive haemorrhage internally. The police concluded that Victoria likely wasn’t sexually assaulted, but there were some scratches on her inner thighs and bruising to her wrists, which suggested someone might have tried. She was fully clothed, although some of her clothing was torn – only a gold locket with a heart-shaped pendant was missing. Her parents remember she was wearing it that day and photographs from the party show it around her neck too.

SeenTheLight says they are scanning for lockets like this for sale online and emailing each seller asking them whether there is an engraving on the back. Victoria’s said ‘VP’ in a swirling font, a Christmas present from her parents. Despite a couple of promising leads, so far SeenTheLight hasn’t come up with anything.

There’s a red envelope flashing in the top right of the page. A private message. Sam had posted on the forum a few weeks ago, saying he was interested in making a documentary about the case and that he planned to travel to Conley, so to let him know of any leads. He clicks into the message.

The message is from someone called TruthBomb. ‘Managed to dig this up,’ it reads. Sam opens the document and it’s a scanned news story from October 1995, a couple of months after Victoria’s death. It’s an article from the Conley News about a spate of flashing incidents in the town. ‘Could be worth pursuing.’

The footer to TruthBomb’s profile says that his own sister disappeared in 1978, a link out to a thread about the case. She was nine and vanished from their street in Milwaukee, just her bike left behind. TruthBomb remembers seeing the wheel still spinning. She has never been found. Sam has to stop himself reading through all of the hundreds of posts about her disappearance.

He makes a note of the story from the Conley News, adding it to the list of things to follow up on – although near the bottom for now, a ‘??’ for who he would interview. He’d need to track down some victims as so far the police have refused to give him much, saying they couldn’t comment on individual crimes and didn’t encourage speculation.

Judith had told Sam that the police hadn’t done enough to find out what happened to Victoria. Even though they’d been tight-lipped with him, what little Sam had garnered through a Freedom of Information request didn’t bear out what Judith said. They’d talked to over two hundred and fifty contacts about the case and interviewed almost a hundred of them as witnesses. This scale of work should have yielded answers.

Sam opens up YouTube in another tab to watch a video he’s already watched more than ten times before – the original reconstruction of Victoria’s last known movements. It aired on Crimewatch and the local news shortly after her death. The ‘Recommended for You’ videos in his sidebar are now other similar programmes that he’s morbidly compelled to click through. People getting on buses, going out to work and never being seen again. At least not alive. Bodies in ditches and quarries and even their own homes, no trace of the killer.

Scrolling down the page, there’s video after video. He wonders how many of them are solved, who’s been found, who’s still out there, their bodies rotting away somewhere. Some of them simply don’t want to be found. He scrolls back up, presses play on his laptop screen and maximises the video.

It shows the actresses playing Victoria and Sylvie leaving Sylvie’s house and walking across the street. Sylvie on the left, Victoria on the right. Strange acting gig, Sam thinks. They’re laughing and nudging each other. He always wonders what they were talking about, strains to listen as if he could hear.

There’s a patch of grass and Victoria starts running and does a cartwheel, flashing her stomach, springing over. Then she stands tall and straight, pointing her toe and sticking her hands out to the sides for balance, a gymnast finishing a routine. She wipes her hands on her jeans then puts up the hood of her red top. The rain is getting heavier; you can see it against the street lights. Sylvie puts a protective hand across her hair and that makes Sam smile. He’s seen his daughter Natalie doing the same thing, on Saturday nights, dashing from the house to the taxi, running in high heels, a little clutch bag held aloft. He wonders if Sylvie remembered that about the hair so they could put it in the reconstruction, the strange details that stick in the mind.

On the screen, the girls get halfway up the hill, stop near the open expanse of the park and say goodbye to each other. Sylvie watches Victoria continue past the park entrance to the top of the street. She turns to wave twice before disappearing from view. The camera follows Victoria alone then. She pushes her fists into the sleeves of the red jacket and pulls the hood around her face.

When Natalie was young she used to believe, like most children do, that people lived inside the television. Sam thinks of that now, following Victoria so closely down the street, like he’s right behind her. The rain, the sound of her breathing, the trees swishing. The sound of her breathing isn’t on the video at all, though – he realises that’s in his head.

The film shows Victoria walking along the road, her head bowed down, looking left and right from time to time. Sam wonders where that detail had come from. Who could know if no one saw her? Was the actress or the police making their own interjection? Something reported to them that hasn’t been made public?

Victoria goes into the phone box and jabs at the phone on the corner. She dials a number,

lets it ring a few times then puts the phone down. Then she quickly picks it up again and does the same thing. This time someone answers and the coin drops into the phone.

Victoria speaks into the receiver, clamping it to her ear and close to her mouth.

‘Taxi please from the phone box on Thistle Street.’ A pause for the operator to speak. ‘It’s for Victoria.’

Another wait.

‘The lake. I’m going to Conley Lake… Is it going to be long?’ she says.

While she waits, Victoria paces around the phone box, kicking at the ground, stopping and sitting on the kerb for a while, under the street lamp like a theatre spotlight.

After a few minutes, a silver taxi arrives. The clock in the corner of the screen flips by faster to show time has been speeded up for the film. She must have waited longer, of course. Victoria gets in the back of the car. Sam is as close to the laptop as he can get, crouched on the end of the bed, ear tipped in, straining to hear.

Victoria is pressed into the corner of the back seat, forehead against the window. The camera then films the car from the outside, panning further and further back. It becomes a totally unremarkable silver car. No one would notice it, no one would remember, Sam thinks. Someone whizzing right by you, never to be seen alive again.

An involuntary shiver runs over him. Natalie used to say, so casually, that it meant the devil was walking over your grave.

The camera focuses not on the taxi driver or Victoria in the back, but on the car from a distance. It makes sense: it’s what someone walking or driving by might have seen. A silver taxi, a girl huddled in the back. The rain would have obscured her, though. The windscreen wipers are going quickly, the downpour heavy.

The camera follows the car up the narrow road to the lake. No other cars pass. At the lake a few street lamps are dotted around the edge, pools of light in the otherwise-darkness. The place is deserted, or it looks to be in the areas that are visible. Victoria gets out of the car, closes the door and walks away. There’s a pause and she looks back. She’s in the full beam of the headlights and she covers her eyes with her arm. Then she turns and disappears into the darkness. The taxi waits for a few moments then drives off.

A narrator starts reading out the number to call for anyone who has any information, but the clip cuts out halfway through, the screen turning to black-and-white static – taped from the television. Sam thinks of what would happen if anyone called now – it would be a dead line.

The end of the video is frustratingly abrupt. Sam plays it again from the part where Victoria gets out of the taxi. She slams the door and then walks towards the blackness of the lake. Each time, it feels like you’re being pulled in, like you’re on the cusp of seeing what happened, who she was meeting, and then it’s just the static hiss of the end of a videotape.