‘No. I haven’t seen them. But I think Michael has them, or had them, I guess. He was a careful man, my brother. He’ll have put them somewhere safe – I just don’t know where that is yet.’ I turned back to Siobhan. ‘Why now? You’re willing to lay out seven hundred thousand dollars for this, so why not just pay the three hundred at the time? She might still be alive.’

‘He doesn’t mean to be brash – we’re short on time,’ Juliette chipped in apologetically.

‘It’s all right,’ Edgar said over his wife, frowning. ‘Time helps you value things differently. It’s easy to see now that we made a mistake. Back then, we trusted the detective when she said that withholding payment was the right thing to do. And we – well, it seemed like a lot of money at the time. The thing is, we could have paid it. Should have paid it. We’d pay anything now.’

‘The detective, this was Alison Humphreys?’

Edgar and Siobhan both nodded. Andy tried to take a subtle sip of his beer, but missed his mouth and dribbled it down his front. He glowed red with embarrassment.

‘Why didn’t Alan just sell you the information directly?’

‘We didn’t know Michael had anything to do with Alan. He just told us Alan had screwed it up from the inside. We were buying what Michael knew.’

‘We didn’t pay him to kill Alan, if that’s what you mean,’ Siobhan cut in. ‘We read about that in the news. We’re not like that.’

‘We guessed they were partners or something,’ Edgar explained. ‘Alan knew we were vulnerable, and he gave Michael enough information about our daughter to appeal to our sentimentality, which worked. But they had a falling out over the money, as people tend to do. We figured our investment was probably down the drain.’ The word ‘investment’ was a strange choice, but then so was a green polo shirt at the snow, so I thought it fit Edgar well enough.

‘Until Michael wrote to us from prison,’ Siobhan said. ‘He said he had the photographs and, by the time he got up here, he’d have the body too. And so we’re here.’

‘Honouring our end,’ Edgar said, the gravitas in his voice making it clear that he wanted me to respect this.

Credit to Michael; it seemed like pretty easy money. The only problem was, he had showed up to meet Alan thirty-three thousand dollars light. He’d told me it was the reason that Alan pulled a gun. I thought I might just understand that part, and it didn’t involve the McAuleys. I tucked the thought away to examine later and turned my mind to the other players.