‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would have wanted to hurt him?’

‘No! He was a good man. Everyone liked him.’ She looked at her parents for confirmation.

‘No one had anything but good to say about John Henderson,’ Francis said. ‘He didn’t have an enemy in the world.’

‘Yet someone stabbed him in the garage of his home at Hvidahus, drove him almost all the way here and set his body beside the dummy of you on the verge. Our crime-scene investigator found the original in the ditch further up the road. That would suggest to me that John had an enemy.’ Willow kept her voice even, but looked to check that Evie had heard her and was taking in the words. She would have preferred to talk to the woman on her own, but could hardly send the parents away. ‘I assume that you do want the murderer caught and punished.’

‘That’s not for me to worry about,’ Evie said. ‘That way lies madness.’

Willow saw that one of the photographs pinned to the board on the wall was of Evie at her hen party. She was in the bar in Voe, dressed up in some sort of animal costume. A fake-fur suit and furry ears. A glass of beer was on the table in front of her and she had her arm round a plump woman dressed liked a pirate. Both of them were pulling faces.

The silence that followed the words was broken by Francis Watt, who put the teapot on the table and handed round mugs. The ritual of tea, Willow thought, is like a liturgy itself, comforting because it’s so familiar. She watched Jessie pour, waved her hand to show that she didn’t take milk.

‘But you will help us,’ Perez said. ‘You will answer our questions truthfully?’

‘Of course! But I won’t guess. I won’t speculate.’

‘When did you last speak to John?’ he asked.

OK! Willow thought. So now Perez is taking over my interview. But she didn’t interrupt. Perez seemed to have grasped Evie’s attention. Demanded it and held it tight. Her eyes were fixed on his face. Two people who had lost the people they loved. They could have been alone in the world.

‘On the phone this morning,’ Evie said. ‘We spoke to each other when we first woke up. Every day. Even if we planned to meet up later. He was an early riser and so am I. It was seven o’clock. I made tea, sat here and phoned John.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘The usual things.’ For the first time Evie sounded close to tears. ‘How much I loved him. How I couldn’t wait to see him. How I was counting the minutes to Saturday when we could be together as man and wife.’

‘He was going to work at lunchtime?’ Perez asked.