‘Not straight away, no. I wasn’t very well that week, and Frank’s never really liked me, so I didn’t want to mug myself off by going over there, like I was desperate, or something. But when it got to a week, I couldn’t take it any more – the not knowing, and that. So I drove over there to have it out with him. Only Frank said he hadn’t even been there, and then his girlfriend made a dig about Evan being a liar, so we had a row and I came home. And then Evan’s sister rang and told me he’d kissed Frank’s girlfriend, and that’s when I realized he’d only come back because Frank had kicked him out and he had nowhere else to go.’

The hurt and anger about the betrayal had returned, and her hands were shaking so badly, she spilled scalding tea on her thigh.

‘Shit!’ she hissed, slamming the cup down on the table and rubbing her leg. ‘Sorry . . . it just makes me so mad to think about all the lies. I thought we were back on track, I really did, but he was using me.’

‘He didn’t seem unhappy?’ Strachan asked.

‘No!’ Marie snapped. ‘I already told you, I thought he was fine. Why do you keep asking that?’

‘I’m trying to establish his frame of mind the last time you saw him,’ said Strachan. Then, reaching into the bag she’d placed at her feet, she took out a sheet of paper and handed it over. ‘Do you recognize this jacket?’

Marie stared at the black-and-white photograph. It was a still taken from CCTV footage, and the central image was a rear view of a man wearing a jacket with a distinctive logo emblazoned across the back of it.

‘It’s Evan’s work jacket,’ she said. ‘He was wearing it when he left that morning. But what does this mean?’

‘Given the condition of the victim’s body, a visual identification isn’t possible,’ Strachan explained. ‘Your husband’s the registered owner of the car, but he hadn’t reported it as stolen, and he himself hadn’t been reported as missing, so we decided to do a few checks before approaching you. This is not the kind of news we want to deliver if we’ve got the wrong person, as you can probably imagine.’

‘What kind of checks?’ Marie asked.

‘We tracked the vehicle’s movements prior to it arriving at the quarry,’ said Strachan. ‘The quarry’s located in a remote area which doesn’t have CCTV coverage, but we were able to pick up images of the car passing through a village several miles away. We hadn’t been able to see the driver’s face, so we backtracked from the point it went off the radar. This image was picked up at a motorway service station an hour before the car arrived in the village.’