‘It was what people said about her.’

‘Did she consider you an arse, Mr Taylor?’

‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’

They were steering him somewhere, because he suddenly felt like a deer being driven across the moor towards the place where it would inevitably be met with a bullet in the heart or the brain.

‘How well did you know Ailsa Cummings?’

That same question repeated. He repeated his answer. ‘Not well. She was in a different age group from me. With different friends.’

‘So you weren’t a thing?’ Snyder said.

He tried to look affronted by such a suggestion. ‘As I said, I was in a relationship with Caroline Campbell at the time.’ He almost blurted out about the baby, but stopped himself in time.

The silence that followed seemed unusually long. Like that moment on the hill when they waited for the hunter, known as ‘the rifle’, to begin pressing the trigger.

He almost heard a bang as the bullet he’d been waiting for met its target. Him.

‘Then, Mr Taylor, can you explain to us why your semen was found on the inside of the knickers Ailsa Cummings was wearing the night she died?’

Greg

Greg remained outwardly silent while his head filled with the sounds and images of that night. Ailsa at the bar, trying to catch his attention. Caroline’s eyes on him all the time.

His despair when he saw Ailsa finally leave. That last look she’d thrown him, both teasing and certain that he would come after her.

He’d heard Josh and his mates giving her a hard time as she’d exited. Offering to walk her home, when what they were really asking for was sex somewhere in the woods.

He knew she’d already tasted some of the gang. Josh, certainly, and more than once. A couple of the others. Finn watched in silence from afar. She’d danced with Finn on occasion, she’d told him, but nothing more than that. He was too quiet for her and – she’d screwed up her face – much too nice.

‘Mr Taylor,’ Snyder’s voice broke through the fabric of his thoughts.

‘I’m sorry?’

Snyder repeated the earlier question that had caused his world to shatter. He was now waiting for an answer.

He decided there was no point denying it. ‘I had sex with Ailsa the night she went missing,’ he said quietly.

‘You told us you hardly knew the girl. She was too young for you. Yet you had sex with her. Or did you not, in fact, rape Ailsa Cummings?’

‘No,’ he found himself shouting. ‘I did not rape her. It was consensual.’

‘Unfortunately, Ailsa’s no longer alive and therefore can’t confirm that,’ DS Reid said pointedly.

‘We were in a relationship. Of sorts,’ he said.

‘Of sorts?’ DS Reid said. ‘What does that mean exactly?’