Marie stared at the photo again, and frowned.

‘What is it?’ Strachan asked.

‘He looks like he’s lost weight,’ Marie said, her tone sad. ‘Evan really likes his food, so I’m guessing his new woman hasn’t been feeding him very well. Either that, or he’s been working it off – physically,’ she added bitterly, breathing in deeply at the thought of Evan having rampant sex with a faceless sex goddess.

The officers exchanged a surreptitious glance, then Strachan said, ‘If you look at the date and time in the corner, you’ll see that this image was captured at two fifteen a.m. on the twenty-eighth of December, Mrs Peters. And you said your husband left here on the morning of the twenty-seventh – is that right?’

‘Yeah.’ Marie nodded. ‘I remember because it was his first day back at work after the Christmas holidays.’

‘That image was taken the same night, going into the next morning,’ Strachan reiterated. ‘And there’s no way he could have noticeably lost weight in that time.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ Marie was confused.

‘OK, forget about the jacket for a minute, and take another look at the picture,’ said Strachan. ‘Would you say that’s your husband – from the shape of him, the length of his legs, the way he’s standing, etcetera?’

Marie stared at the picture again. Strachan had told her to forget about the jacket, but her eye was continually drawn to the logo, because that was the only real detail she could see. The figure did look slimmer than she remembered Evan to be; the shoulders not as broad, the legs maybe not as long. But that could be a result of the angle the picture had been taken from, she supposed. She’d once overheard two teenage girls discussing the best angles to hold a camera for the perfect selfie, and they had reckoned that an overhead shot made them look much slimmer and shorter than a straight-on shot. That, added to the fact that she hadn’t actually laid eyes on Evan in a while, made it possible that she’d exaggerated his size in her mind’s eye.

‘I honestly don’t know?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe. Yeah, probably. Oh, God, I don’t know.’

‘Take your time,’ said Strachan.

Marie looked again, then shook her head.

‘No, it’s not him. He’s bigger than that. The jacket’s definitely his, though. See that bit . . .’ She pointed out an untidy section where the material joined the waistband. ‘I sewed that, so you’ll easily know it’s his if you’ve found it, ’cos I made a bit of a mess of it.’