He’d met his second wife, Alison, on the set of Neeps and Tatties: With all the Trimmings, their 1984 festive special which had won the Christmas Day ratings war, albeit exclusively in the STV region of Western Scotland. She’d been working as an assistant in the makeup department, was ten years his junior, and had been heavily pregnant when they’d walked up the aisle in September of the following year.

They went on to have three sons, all now in their thirties, before divorcing in 2003 due to Archie’s alleged infidelity.

Fortunately for Mr Tatties, he’d been as good as broke at the time of the divorce, and Alison had walked away with nothing but the keys to a Nissan Micra, and a part share in a poky wee flat in the East End of Glasgow, back in the days before redevelopment had started to drive up property prices.

The news had been broken to the families. Cursory interviews had been carried out over the phone, with a promise to follow-up in more detail later. They were quickly ruled out as suspects, though—Archie’s sons all lived abroad, and his ex-wife had been staying with the youngest in Australia for the better part of three months. All pretty solid, as alibis went.

With the family backstory all wrapped up, Sinead gladly surrendered the floor to Logan, who rattled his way through the report that Shona had sent. Between that, and the one Geoff Palmer had emailed over, they were able to build up a bit of a picture of what had happened on the night the family had died.

They’d eaten dinner, probably around six. It was possible they’d played one of the battered board games that were kept in a cupboard in the house, as the box was on the shelf of the coffee table, and their fingerprints were all over the pieces.

The kids had polished off some cookies and milk, then gone through to the bedroom at the back of the house and climbed into the two single beds. Archie and Donna had poured themselves some wine, set the fire roaring, and then…

“Someone turned up,” Logan said. “Either the door was unlocked, they had a key, or they just knocked and were let in. No sign of forced entry, anyway.”

“Do we know if there’s anything missing from the house, boss?” Tyler asked.

“What, apart from a human child, you mean?” Logan retorted.

“Eh, aye. Apart from that, I mean?”

“Not that we know of. But we don’t know what they had with them, so it’s hard to say. We need to focus on that baby, though. That’s the key.”

“I checked with Pete Hill. The taxi driver. The wee one was definitely alive. He could hear it breathing when he was helping load up the luggage,” Hamza said.

“Right, well that’s good news, at least,” Logan said.