Ollie brought up a photograph. ‘This is an Eric Jackson, long-distance lorry driver with—’ He quoted a company name. ‘He’s been doing that for a while. Forty years or so with various firms. Initially in the UK and Ireland, then abroad.’

McNab studied the image, which looked like a recent passport photograph, all washed out, with staring eyes and definitely no smiling permitted. Jackson didn’t look like anyone you might welcome into your country. McNab suspected his own passport photo would fall into the same category.

Ollie continued, ‘Mr Jackson can be away from home frequently and for long periods, as his wife stated. He isn’t, however, out of the country on a job at this particular moment in time.’

‘You’re telling me she lied?’ McNab said sharply.

‘Not necessarily. Maybe his schedule got changed or he came back earlier than expected,’ Ollie suggested.

‘Or maybe she didn’t want us talking to him,’ McNab offered a different explanation. ‘You’ve tried making contact again?’

Ollie nodded. ‘With no success.’

‘But he is in the UK?’

‘According to his company, he is.’

Maybe the marriage of forty-four years wasn’t as perfect as they’d been led to believe, McNab thought. He recalled the anger Eleanor Jackson had shown at, as she put it, the dragging up of things from the past. The way in which Mary’s disappearance had broken up families.

Eleanor Jackson had never explained why she’d hadn’t kept in contact with her younger sister, but she’d alluded to the disappearance of Mary McIntyre as being connected to it.

McNab thought back to his reading of McCreadie’s interview with Eleanor as a sixteen-year-old. She’d sounded like a stroppy teenager, duly pissed off that her life had been disrupted by the disappearance of a girl who she didn’t even like and who she believed was simply hiding to get attention. And that may well have been the case. Mary had crossed her dad and his belt threat a few times, according to her sister, Jean. Even Jean had considered the possibility – or false hope – that Mary would suddenly appear, safe and well.

Would he like to be reminded about some of the things he’d said or done aged sixteen? Back when he thought being handy with a chib was a useful skill on the road to adulthood?

That was a question that didn’t need answering.

Plus it had come from McCreadie’s notes. A crime fiction guy. Who was to say it wasn’t fiction he was writing back then too? If it was, then no wonder Eleanor Jackson was so angry about it.

Something had happened to the Marshall family that had made them move house and split up. And that something seemed to rest with their youngest daughter, Karen. Maybe that was why Eleanor didn’t want anything more to do with her sister.

What was it Robbie McIntyre had said? We were as happy as any other family on that street.

McNab checked the time. Robbie McIntyre would be coming in shortly. He’d rung the station as soon as he’d heard from his sister Jean about the death of Alec McLaughlin.