‘We’ll keep working on it for now. In the meantime, I managed to track down and speak to O’Connor’s ex-partner. She told me that he became impossible to live with after losing his job at the farm,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t find other work and he was angry most of the time. She knows he lied to the Batemans about not stealing their personal belongings because she found a watch in his pocket that didn’t belong to him. However, he denied it when she confronted him and then things between them went from bad to worse. A few weeks later she decided she’d had enough and walked out. She now lives in Lancaster and hasn’t heard from him in months.’

‘I don’t want to give up on O’Connor just yet. Let’s hold off for now on charging him with assaulting a police officer,’ James said. ‘I’d rather keep him here than have him appear in court and be shunted off to prison on remand. At least we’ll have easy access to him while we carry out further enquiries.’

James then moved on to what Savage had said about the friction between Charlotte and her mother, and the revelation that Mary may have been unfaithful to Robert.

DC Patterson interjected to share that he’d been speaking to the family’s GP, Dr Kevin Prior.

‘The most interesting thing he had to say was about Mary Bateman, who he described as socially awkward and troubled,’ Patterson said. ‘She’d been a regular visitor to his surgery for years as she suffered frequent bouts of depression and periods of psychosis during which she had hallucinations, including hearing voices. He reckons she lived in a state of anxiety most of the time but refused to see a psychiatrist, although she was on anti-depressants. And she had regular panic attacks. The doctor says her problems began soon after she and her husband took over the farm following the deaths of the Roths. She convinced herself that their ghosts were haunting the farm.’

The more James learned about the family the more dysfunctional they appeared to have been. The father had a gambling addiction, the daughter was dangerously unruly, and the mother was beset by psychological disorders. How much of it, he wondered, had played a part in their deaths?

Before ending the briefing, James decided that it was only fair to explain to the team why two officers in plain clothes were watching his house from a patrol car parked outside. He was sure that the word had already spread but no one had yet approached him about it.

He kept it brief and told them of the long-running threat posed by London crime boss Andrew Sullivan, but stopped short of saying that he was the reason James and Annie had moved out of the capital.