For a moment Perez thought he had the whole thing wrong and that he was about to hear quite a different story from the one he’d conjured in his head. A story of assisted suicide perhaps, of Agnes helped to her rest. But Jen continued immediately. ‘You can’t blame him for taking his comfort where he could find it.’

‘He had a lover?’ Perez looked at them both for confirmation. ‘While his wife was still alive?’ He wondered what it might be like if the woman you loved died slowly and you had to watch. It had been bad enough on the hill on Fair Isle with Fran in his arms, and that had only been for minutes. A slash of a knife. A blade glinting in moonlight. Then it was all over. He didn’t think he’d have had the strength to keep going for years, watching his lover grow weaker every day. At least he supposed he could do it – the practical stuff, the daily routine, pretending to be cheerful. But not on his own. He’d need an escape at the end of the day, someone warm and tender and soft. Someone to make him laugh occasionally.

‘We don’t know that he had an affair,’ Belshaw said. ‘We never knew for certain. And it wasn’t something you’d ask someone like John Henderson. He was such a private man.’

‘But there were rumours?’

‘Oh!’ Jen said dismissively. ‘A place like this there are always rumours. Most of them mean nothing.’

‘But you guessed, didn’t you? Or you found out?’

The three of them sat, looking at each other. Perez’s phone rang. He switched it off without looking at it. It would be Willow Reeves, on the warpath again, wondering what he was up to and why he hadn’t asked permission to leave the police station without telling her where he was going, and demanding an explanation.

‘Henderson’s dead!’ Perez said. ‘You can’t hurt him now.’

‘You’d ruin his reputation.’ Despite his sore throat, Belshaw was almost shouting. ‘Bad enough that his body was all dressed up by the side of the road with that stupid mask on his head. I’ll not have folk sitting in bars and laughing about what he got up to when his wife was ill. He would have hated that.’

‘You cared about him,’ Perez said.

‘I told you, he was the nearest thing to a brother I’ll ever have.’

I used to think that about Duncan Hunter, and he let me down.