‘He’s dead, Orla. He might have strayed a few times but he stayed with you, didn’t he, and there’s no point in raking up the things he did wrong, not now. God will already be judging him for those. Let’s just concentrate on tracking down the person or persons who murdered him, if anybody did.’

Orla poured herself some fizzy water. ‘I should have divorced him, shouldn’t I, years ago? But I could never think of it, Katie. I couldn’t bear to think of us living apart. I loved him so much. I adored him.’

‘Tell me – in the past few weeks, did he receive any threats that you know about?’

‘Threats? Oh, he often had threats. Almost every time he sent anybody down, or handed them a fine, he’d have trolls on Twitter telling him that they were going to cut his throat or smash his head in with a hurly or put a bomb under his car. He never took them seriously, though, and they never scared him, not at all. He said they were proof that he was doing a good job.’

‘How about stalkers? Did he have anybody suspicious following him around lately?’

Orla thought for a few seconds and then shook her head. ‘If he was being followed, he never said anything about it to me.’

‘How about prowlers, around your house?’

‘No. No prowlers. Although now you come to mention it, I did see a strange Range Rover parked up our street a couple of times, early in the week. I don’t know what it was doing there because it didn’t belong to any of our neighbours. It was there on Monday morning and then again on Tuesday afternoon.’

‘A Range Rover?’

‘I think it was a Range Rover. That kind of a big car, anyway. It was only about thirty metres away, on the opposite side of the street.’

‘What colour was it?’

‘Sort of silvery-grey.’

‘Could you see if there was anybody in it?’

‘I couldn’t, no. There was too much reflection on the windscreen.’

‘You didn’t happen to see anybody getting in or out of it?’

‘No. It didn’t stay for long. I first noticed it on the Monday morning when I went out the front door to check if we’d any post. Maybe five minutes after that I took Garrett a cup of tea in his study and when I looked out the Range Rover had gone. On the Tuesday afternoon I saw it out of the upstairs bedroom window, but I’d say it could only have been there for ten or fifteen minutes. I didn’t really pay it too much attention. Like, I had no reason to.’