He inclines his head a little, acknowledging the point. “Aye. Well. Maybe.” It sounds like mebbe. “It wouldnae have surprised me. She was young and a bonnie lass; she liked to be center of attention and she wasnae short of admirers. There were a fair few who might have been holding a torch for her.” He shrugs. “We looked into it at the time, but there was nothing . . . definitive. And even if your dad had found her up to nae good, I doubt he would have upped and left immediately. Not without at least packing a bag, or his research.”

“Unless he had some kind of mental breakdown.”

“Aye, possible. But I didnae see him as the type.” What is the type? I wonder. Does he think he can read it on a person’s skin, in the way they blether, in the way they drink their pint? Though Glen was a policeman for decades, he probably knows more about human psychology than I’m giving him credit for. “The problem for the investigation was that we couldnae pin down where he went missing from. We couldnae trace him after he flew back to Edinburgh Airport. And to be honest, he might not have been on the flight. The computer was down that day in Antwerp, and check-in was a disaster. It was some lassie ticking the passenger name off on a list and then writing the boarding pass with a Biro. The on-plane head count was off from the list count by three. You couldnae take off like that now, but this was the 1980s.” He grimaces and spreads his hands. “There wasnae any CCTV in operation back then. He could have got on a bus or hopped in a taxi or just walked out of Edinburgh Airport. Or maybe he never flew back to Edinburgh at all. All we know is he didnae take his car; we found that a couple of days later in one of the airport long-stay car parks. With a flat battery.”

None of this is new to me, exactly, but it’s the first time I’ve ever had it delivered straight. I can’t quite pin down how I gathered the information I do know. I have hazy memories of the first few days after he went missing, of being sent to another room when somber hard-faced men came to speak to Karen, of flattening myself against the wall near the doorway to listen in silently. I suppose I also asked my mother later what they said, though I can’t imagine she was very forthcoming. I know I must have read the newspapers; there was a particular line that got tangled in my seven-year-old brain: The police are appealing to anybody with information to come forward. The somber hard-faced men were the police that were appealing, my mother said, but they didn’t seem very appealing to me. I worried that anybody with information would be too frightened to come forward.