For some moments his son concentrated on the screen. Bundy was talking to the camera and he realized, uncomfortably, that Bruno was echoing what this monster was saying. He was tempted to grab the remote and switch the television off, but he held back. Let him continue and he would try to engage with him after the programme was over. He turned to Cleo again. ‘How long till breakfast?’

‘Ten minutes.’

‘I’ll go and jump into the shower.’

‘Yes, one choice has been made,’ Bruno said, suddenly. ‘What I can and cannot eat, apparently.’

‘What you can and cannot eat?’ Grace asked him.

‘Jah. I’m blood-type A positive, which Mama told me was a meat-eaters’ group. Now my new mother tells me she was wrong. I should be eating vegetarian – and vegan.’

‘Well, we’re all trying to eat more healthily, Bruno.’

‘You’re making a value judgement based on an unproven hypothesis,’ Bruno said.

Grace glanced at Cleo, who caught his eye with a silent what? Both of them were constantly startled by the very adult expressions and opinions Bruno regularly came up with. Was this the result of things he had picked up from his mother Sandy – Grace’s former and estranged wife – in first ten years of his life, or was it how kids his age were today, Grace wondered?

As he went upstairs, he was thinking back to a parents’ evening at Bruno’s school last autumn. To something the bemused headmaster had told them. He’d said that when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Bruno had replied, ‘Either a chemist or a dictator.’

They understood the peripatetic upbringing Bruno must have had with his erratic mother, before coming to live with them in England after her suicide.

Both he and Cleo hoped that by introducing him to a stable, loving family environment, they could, in time, change him. But so far there was little sign of that happening. It probably hadn’t helped that he’d been a largely absent father during these past six months, and he determined now that he was back down in Sussex to spend more time with him.

They had an ally in a forensic child psychologist called Orlando Trujillo, who had been giving them advice on how to handle Bruno. Trujillo had warned them against trying to intervene too much at this stage, but rather to simply observe and gradually try to instil in Bruno new values. They were doing their best, but God, it was hard. And to compound their difficulties, with one major trial running at Lewes Crown Court starting tomorrow, and a murder investigation he was leading, in addition to all the preparations he needed to do for the Chief Superintendent boards, he was going to be desperately squeezed for time.