They have reached the kissing gate where Conor contemplated killing himself twenty-four hours earlier. Silas rests his hands on the curved metal bar and closes his eyes. This is about as bad as it could be. If Conor has got involved in a county lines network, he’ll soon be arrested, and Silas’s own shame will be complete. His career could be over too.

‘Why here?’ Silas asks, looking across the water meadow back towards the village. ‘In this village?’

‘That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.’

Silas turns to face Jake. He doesn’t want to look at the track any more, imagine what could have happened here. He’s seen the results before.

‘I can’t be certain,’ Jake says, hesitating, ‘but I think he might have been the one who torched my boat.’

The two men stare at each other. Silas doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He senses at once that it’s true. Jake asks some awkward questions at the Bluebell and that night his boat is set on fire. The county lines ringleaders would use someone else to do their dirty work, someone expendable like Conor.

‘Oh Christ,’ Silas says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Not your fault,’ Jake says, trying to make light of it.

But Silas knows he is to blame, in more ways than Jake will ever understand. He was close to his son when Conor was a young boy, a toddler on the beach, playing in the park. It was all so easy back then. Build a sandcastle. Fly a kite. Kick a ball. Look at that new man, what a great dad he is. So in touch! The teenage years were the problem: as Silas’s working day got longer, Conor became more withdrawn. They seemed to lose touch with each other, drift apart. No common ground or shared interests.

‘It’s just a hunch,’ Jake says. ‘And maybe I’m wrong. But I’ve never seen him around here before. And then he’s hanging about the next day, lighting his cigarette with a match. Most people have lighters now, and, well, I heard a match being struck just before the boat caught fire.’

‘The investigation’s ongoing,’ Silas says. ‘If Conor’s involved, he’ll be brought in, of course.’

He doesn’t know why he’s saying all this. It’s for his own benefit as much as Jake’s. The reality is that the investigation is going nowhere. No fingerprints on the abandoned jerrycan. No witnesses. More serious crimes to deal with. And Jake’s hunch is hardly compelling evidence. As flimsy as matchwood.

Silas is about to turn and walk back towards the canal when his phone rings. The mobile number is not familiar. For a moment he considers letting it go to voicemail, but something makes him answer it.

‘DI Hart,’ he says.