‘OK. So like I say, your brother wasn’t swept out to sea. In fact, he was pulled from the river. It was Chris’s misfortune that the man who rescued him from the river should be a known sex offender. He put Chris into his car. They must have driven for some distance. Perhaps Chris became suspicious, something about the way the guy was behaving, perhaps. Or possibly Chris knew that he wasn’t being driven home. Either way, at some point Chris escaped from the guy’s car.’

‘He escaped . . .’

Tess held up a hand. Again: wait. Her eyes dropped. ‘Not quite. He got out of the guy’s car and ran into the path of another vehicle. I’m sorry, Alex, but he was killed instantly.’ She paused, looking at Abbott as if to assess his reaction. ‘There was no fault on the part of the other driver,’ she told him. ‘He wasn’t speeding or drunk or anything. Chris literally ran out in front of him.’

Abbott absorbed the information, feeling what, he couldn’t say for certain. Only that it was cushioned by a great numbness. He reached for his drink, grateful of the excuse to take a good long swallow. ‘What happened to him, the kidnapper?’

Tess continued. ‘When the police got round to his house, they found him in the process of smashing computers and discovered that there was already a fire in the back garden. They did manage to retrieve some images of child sex abuse from a laptop that had not yet been thrown onto the fire, and that, plus the charge of attempted kidnapping, was enough to put him away.’

‘So he went away?’

‘Yes. For a long time.’

He nodded as though satisfied but the thought in his head was, That’s not enough. ‘How did you get this information?’ he asked her.

‘Well, I could have made a subject access request through the official channels, but instead I called in a favour. A favour with a warrant card, the necessary security clearance and access to a computer.’

Abbott nodded. ‘Which prison?’

‘He died inside,’ she said. But Abbott watched her eyes slip away. A tell if ever he’d seen one. He filed the moment away for the time being.

‘What was his name?’ he asked.

‘His name?’

‘Yes. The name of the paedophile. The one who died in prison. What was his name?’

She looked at him.

‘Go on,’ prompted Abbott.

‘I need you to tell me . . .’

‘Tell you what? That I won’t go after him? He’s dead, remember?’

‘Of course. But reassure me that you won’t, I don’t know, go after members of his family or something. That you’ll leave it there.’

‘I wouldn’t take it out on his family,’ said Abbott, surprised she’d even think so. ‘I’d never do something like that.’

‘OK. His name was Jason Scutter,’ she told him.