Two reboots later, still with the same message, he’d been ready to throw in the towel and head upstairs to clean up and prepare for Matilda’s homecoming the following day. He’d already wasted too much time on the plasticky little camera, which he had hoped would give him a clue as to why Molander might have wanted his father-in-law dead.

But he hadn’t been able to tear himself away. He had stayed in the basement nursing what amounted to an obsession with accessing the contents of the memory card.

He had tried sticking it in Matilda’s camera, which had been a Christmas present, only to be rewarded with the message unknown format. The only way forward at that point had been to take the camera apart and calmly and methodically go over its insides and make sure everything looked okay. Just to be safe, he had dried any potential moisture with Sonja’s blow-dryer.

The whole thing had taken him over an hour and a half, and he had heard himself say a quiet prayer before reinserting the new batteries, carefully sliding the memory card back in and pushing the tiny ‘on’ button. He had even closed his eyes, hoping it would emit a little tune when it started.

Nothing.

If he’d had a hammer to hand, he would have smashed the camera. But he didn’t, so now he was sitting at his computer, staring at the results of his Google search.

To his surprise, his question had generated over 133,000 hits. He clicked on the second one, which redirected him to www.thephotosite.se where a certain Alfred_d seemed to be getting the exact same message about the file or catalogue being damaged and unreadable.

He had already tried all the suggested solutions.

All except one.

PC Inspector was a piece of German freeware that claimed to be able to re-create and repair files on external memory cards. Even if you had accidentally reformatted a memory card, the programme could help. It sounded too good to be true, and given that it was completely free, there could be no doubt it contained a virus or something else you would never under any circumstances want on your computer.

And yet, he pressed download.

He regretted it immediately but couldn’t help looking forward to what would happen when the growing bar reached one hundred per cent, and against all better judgement, he followed every instruction, approved the user licence and even put in his VISA number and CVC code.

It was only after the laborious installation process was completed that he realized he had purchased the full version of the software with free updates for years to come.