‘When my mother came to Edinburgh last year, and you arranged for me to meet her in the hotel, she told me about a Christmas party, years earlier, at the factory where my father worked. They were young, struggling for money. Good jobs were hard to come by and she didn’t speak great English, so my father was supporting them both. He was a supervisor at Edinburgh Bespoke, popular, with a wife so beautiful – and exotic, being French in those days – that I guess there was an amount of envy at work. When a truck broke down during the Christmas party, my father was sent out to fetch it. He could drive and hadn’t been drinking as he was with my mother. He took his responsibilities as a husband very seriously. Ironically, if he’d been drinking that night, my mother would have been perfectly safe.’

Ava said nothing. She didn’t need to. Any experienced police officer could have guessed what was coming.

‘The company was run by two men. Gilroy Western and the late Bruce Jenson. While my father was out they offered my young, innocent mother a tour of the factory, including their offices, which were upstairs away from the music and rowdiness of the party.’

‘Oh God …’ Ava muttered.

‘They got her into an office, shut the door, shoved a canvas bag over her head and one of them raped her. It was obvious they’d agreed what they were going to do in advance, no question about it. She had no way of defending herself and she’d had a couple of glasses to drink at the party. They told her if she reported them, they’d say she’d offered herself to them and her husband would be sacked.’

‘And your father would have killed them. Quite literally, if he was anything like you,’ Ava added.

‘So there you go. That’s the horrible truth about why I was there. I tried for such a long time to stay away from Jenson, but when I saw my mother in Paris, I realised that the passage of years hasn’t dulled the pain they put her through. Not one bit.’

‘You can’t tell Pax Graham about this,’ Ava said, her brain already several steps ahead. ‘With that sort of motive there’s no way I could continue to keep you on active duty.’

‘Then suspend me. I didn’t do it, Ava. I wanted to. I held that bastard’s face to make him look at a photo of my parents, but he was so far gone with the dementia that I might as well have been holding a corpse’s chin. Bruce Jenson was already serving his sentence. That’s what I realised while I was there.’

‘The vase?’ Ava asked.