‘Get your feet off the table, Kiki, and stop swearing,’ Mrs Roy said, gesturing at the camera. ‘We’re being filmed, in case you hadn’t noticed and I don’t want the great British public thinking my children have been brought up as chavs. In fact,’ she said turning to the camera getting up and approaching the lens. ‘I think we will have this whole section removed if you don’t mind.’ The scene cut, and what followed next was much less interesting footage of the production line.

Gillard rubbed his chin as he thought about what he’d seen. He turned the sound down, and absentmindedly watched thousands of jars waddling and jostling along a conveyor until being packed into boxes by a bevy of cheerful, white-hatted women. He was just about to fast forward through it when he noticed the work rate step up. Conversation ceased, everyone looked to the front, and then a wheelchair emerged on the extreme right of the shot. The camera panned towards it. Gillard recognised the elderly man in the chair. Dr Roy, in the flesh. He was a tiny, shrunken figure, with beady eyes and protruding false teeth. He was wearing an Indian tunic, loose dhotiyu trousers and a Gandhi cap. He began pointing at the line with his stick, and Prisha, who was pushing the chair, bent down to listen to his comments. Gillard turned the sound up, and replayed the whole scene. He couldn’t hear anything that was said, but one thing was clear. The staff were terrified of this man.

He next found some raw close-up footage of Dr Roy just staring at the camera, face on. The interviewer was asking questions, about the company, how he met his wife and so on. Dr Roy’s gaze gradually became intense and hostile, the bottom plate of his dentures rattling in and out like a cobra’s tongue. Finally he shouted out something, unintelligible except for the word ‘idiot’.

‘I’m sorry?’ the interviewer asked.

Prisha, off camera, said: ‘He wants you to do your tie up.’

‘Oh, all right. What’s he saying now?’

‘He says you have no respect and are a disgrace.’ She paused to listen to the next phrase. ‘I’m sorry, he is cancelling the interview.’

The scene ended.

It was early on Friday afternoon when Rob Townsend called Gillard from the digital forensics lab. ‘We’ve pretty much finished going through all the Roy family phones. That is Mrs Roy, her three children, Philippa Boswell the PA and Morag Fairburn.’

‘We still don’t have Deepak Tripathi’s phone, do we?’

‘No. It’s a big blank in the middle of our connections map, though since we’ve got the number, we should have basic data from the network provider by the end of the day. As you would expect there is a vast amount of data to crunch, and we haven’t even started on any of the image or video files. A lot of the text messages are in Gujarati, and we’ve put a sampling of them through Google translate, but not found anything incriminating or unusual.’