‘Bain was never going to crumble in front of Jim like he did in front of me, but if Jim was trying to deconstruct the investigation, it must have occurred to him how much hinged upon Bain’s contribution. It shaped the entire thing to the extent that it was responsible for creating the mythology that developed around the case. Last sighting late night at a hotel, people just shrug, think poor bastards must be dead in a ditch, or driven their car into a canal. Last sighting broad daylight at a motorway services, that suggests a journey. All those reports that kept the story alive down the years, people telling the papers they may have seen the Ramsays abroad, that all stems from Bain’s lie.’

‘So there’s a good chance Jim was asking himself what the picture would have looked like without it. Why didn’t the police ever do that?’

‘Presumably they had little else to go on, and no reason to disbelieve Bain.’

‘Apart from him being a petty crook?’

‘That may actually have made him a more credible witness. There was no angle in it for him, as far as the police were aware: no reason why he would come forward and involve himself in this just to lie.’

‘Yet you worked it out right away, soon as you recognised his photograph in the papers.’

‘I didn’t work it out right away, I just had my suspicions, based on a more in-depth knowledge of Mr Bain’s character than the contemporary investigators may have enjoyed.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to prejudice our wee interview, and I needed what they call a Method performance from you, to put him at ease.’

‘I know what a Method performance is. I’m better trained as an actor than as an investigator.’

‘You’re a trained actress?’

He seemed pleased by this, an undisguised delight playing across his face. Jasmine wished she could scrutinise it closer to see whether it was actually amusement, Ingrams perhaps thinking ‘well that would explain a lot’, but she had to keep her eyes on the road.

‘I don’t want to talk about it. As you said, we have to focus.’

‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘And you made a good point before. If my old man was looking for a stooge, he could have come up with plenty who were more ostensibly respectable than Wullie Bain.’

‘Maybe Bain had other attributes that balanced it up,’ Jasmine suggested.

‘Aye. Like knowing his place and not being particularly inquisitive. Wullie was never the kind of person to ask too many questions if you put money in his hand.’

‘Did you know him well back then?’

He stared ahead, evidently no keener to elaborate upon this than she had been about her abortive acting career. But then he took a breath and answered.