‘Did you kill him?’ Hoskins asked.

‘You think I did it? But it was me that asked the dog walker to call the police.’

Hoskins chuckled. ‘Many murderers call the cops. It’s the guilt.’

‘I didn’t kill him!’

‘But you would like to have seen him dead?’

Jakes said nothing for a moment. ‘Well, it’s complicated actually.’

‘The final coincidence,’ Gillard said, ‘is that you just happen to be about the only person in the country to have a recent photograph of him, on your phone. How did you get it?’

Jakes folded his arms and looked into his lap. He said nothing.

‘Come on, Michael. Only half a dozen people in the country knew what Rollason looked like today. How come you are one of them?’

No reply.

‘Did he abuse you?’ Hoskins asked. Gillard was surprised that the detective constable had come out with this one. He obviously hadn’t read up on the statements properly. Rollason was caught in 1988. Jakes would only have been a toddler. It wasn’t impossible, but it didn’t fit Rollason’s known MO.

Jakes stared back at Hoskins. ‘No, he didn’t abuse me. He’s my father.’

The two detectives stared open-mouthed, then looked at each other and declared a short recess.

Michael Jakes sat and stared at the duty solicitor. The middle-aged man, grey suited, grey-haired and wholly undistinguished, started talking at him. Something about his rights and what he should and shouldn’t say.

He didn’t take in a word.

When he was an adolescent he had listened to his older sister, an assertive sixteen, badgering their mother to find out about their dad, Noel, who had died when they were both infants. Susan wanted to know where he was buried or if he had been cremated when they lived up in Newcastle. Why were there no photographs of him? Why was she being robbed of her childhood?

Michael, just fifteen, had long been told he was the man of the house. He had come to his mother’s rescue, holding her in his arms while she cried and cried under Susan’s relentless verbal assault. Eventually his mum blurted out that their father was a bad man who would knock her about and had threatened both of them. ‘He ruined everything in our lives,’ she had said. He had accepted this but his sister kept on, harrying their mother about inconsistencies in her story. Eventually, just a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, with Susan back from university for the summer holidays, their mother called both children together and laid out a stash of family photographs on the dining room table. They’d not seen any of them before.