‘Anything I can do to help. My wife is on the force and so we are more than happy to assist.’

A man approached them.

‘I am DS Ali Hasan. Welcome to our corner of the world. We’ve been going at this for a couple of hours but so far nothing. If the radar doesn’t find anything then as a last effort, we will bring in the cadaver dogs. Sometimes they find things the radars don’t and vice versa.’

‘Thank you for having us,’ Imogen said before turning to Mr Parkin. ‘Is your wife here?’

‘No, she stayed in New York. We were visiting her sister over there and I didn’t think it was fair to ask her to come back when all you needed me to do was let you in. My son came back with me as well, to give his mother some alone time. She’s had this holiday planned for months and you know what a pain it is switching holiday when you’re in the police.’

‘We really appreciate this. Did you ever meet Mr Corrigan, before you bought the house off of him?’ Walsh asked.

‘I did meet him once, yes. I can’t say I liked him much.’

‘Did you meet his wife?’ Imogen asked.

‘No, I’m sorry. He showed me around the place and it was everything we were looking for. We snapped it up because of the lower asking price. My wife fell in love with the garden particularly.’

‘Did you question why they were so desperate to move out quickly?’ Imogen said.

‘It was worth more than we paid for it. He wanted a quick sale. We even knocked him down a little and he still went for it. I’m afraid we didn’t much care why he was doing it. He didn’t even seem remotely fazed. My wife wanted to push it down even more, but I thought we had tried our luck enough. We paid about thirty grand under market price and ten years ago, that was a significant markdown.’

‘Do you know if Mr Corrigan had had any work done on the place before he left?’ Imogen asked.

‘Well, this cellar hadn’t long been done. Do you really think that there’s a body here?’

Imogen shot DS Ali Hasan a look.

‘We don’t know. All we can do at this point is look. Your cooperation is definitely going to speed up the process,’ Walsh said, trying to comfort the man.

‘Will you have to dig up the foundations?’ Mr Parkin said.