O’Connor didn’t have to think about it. ‘That would have been a couple of weeks ago at the Saturday market. He was there with his wife and we bumped into each other. By then I’d realised that it was a waste of time getting into arguments with him, so all we did was acknowledge each other.’

‘Can you explain to me why you harboured such a grudge against him? Presumably he had no choice but to make you redundant given the state of his finances.’

He drew a breath and held it for a while before speaking.

‘But that’s the thing. He didn’t get rid of me because he couldn’t afford to keep me on. He was paying me a pittance anyway. The real reason was that he thought I was stealing from the house.’

‘And were you?’

‘No way. I told him so but he wouldn’t believe me.’

‘So what prompted him to make the allegation?’

He shrugged. ‘Some things went missing over a period of time. A bottle of whisky. A CD. A watch. Mary was convinced it was a ghost because she claimed objects were being moved around as well. But Robert just assumed it was me. When he confronted me, I told him that his daughter was probably the culprit because she needed cash to buy drugs. And that made him really mad. A few days later he gave me my marching orders.’

‘That must have made you very angry,’ James said.

‘It did my head in and I got myself into a right state. I took it out on my girlfriend and she eventually had enough and broke off with me. I suppose I blamed Robert for that too, but not enough to go over there and slaughter the entire family.’

James was thinking fast, mental gears whirring. He didn’t know the man well enough to tell if he was lying. Instinct told him that he wasn’t, but that was hardly enough to give him the all clear.

By his own admission he had no one to support his story about not going out on Christmas Eve until late. And on the way to his brother’s place he might well have stopped at Oaktree Farm to pay the Batemans a visit.

Further enquiries would have to be carried out, but right now James wanted to extract as much information as he could about the family and the farm.

‘Do you know anything about the cellar at the farmhouse? We found a concealed internal door leading from the cellar into the house – any chance you know when it was blocked off?’ James asked.