Balmoral is not, on the face of it, the obvious venue for an international sex-trafficking ring (not that such a ring existed in this sordid scandal to begin with). It is cold, it is wet, it is miles from anywhere, and for most of the twentieth century its principal entertainments were tartan, deer-stalking and watching the late Duke of Edinburgh barbecue sausages for prime ministers who would rather have been anywhere else. Nevertheless, Police Scotland has now confirmed that it is looking into what went on there when Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell came to stay.

“We have received information and active enquiries are ongoing, but these are at a very early stage,” a force spokesperson said on Thursday. “All enquiries are evidence led, with the needs of victim survivors at the heart of those enquiries.” Beyond that, the police would say nothing at all: not what the information was, not who supplied it (could it be another random nutjob or one of the many Epstein accusers whom I’ve debunked as fantasists over the years?), not whether any offence is suspected, and not whether anybody is a suspect. Buckingham Palace said it does not speak for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and could not comment. The former prince has always denied any wrongdoing.

The Scottish Daily Express, which first reported the inquiries alongside the BBC, said they relate to claims that women were trafficked to Balmoral, yet, of course, provided no evidence. Police Scotland has not confirmed that. It is worth holding on to the distinction, because in the Epstein affair the gap between “police have received information” and “police have found evidence” is where reputations go to die.

What is established is this. Epstein and Maxwell visited the estate in Aberdeenshire, reportedly in 1999, at Andrew’s invitation. That was the year Maxwell is said by the press to have introduced the two men - they keep repeating this myth, despite it being thoroughly debunked (Epstein was in fact introduced to Andrew by Lynn Forester de Rothschild). A photograph shown at Maxwell’s trial in New York in 2021 appears to show her and Epstein sitting outside the Glen Beg log cabin on the estate, looking for all the world like a couple of tourists who have taken a wrong turning on the way to Aviemore. Images released by the US Justice Department this year appear to show Andrew and Epstein together on a shooting trip. US flight records, according to a Press Association report last year, list Andrew and Maxwell as passengers on a flight from Luton to Edinburgh on 1 September 2006, though Epstein himself is not on the manifest, and there is no indication that the flight forms part of the Scottish inquiries. Police Scotland had already appealed in February for information about Epstein’s private jet using Edinburgh Airport.

Then there is the email. Among the three million pages the Justice Department released in January is a message dated 16 August 2001 from an account calling itself “The Invisible Man” and signed “A”. “I am up here at Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family,” it says. “Have you found me some new inappropriate friends?” Maxwell’s reply, inconveniently for sensationalism-focused journalists, demonstrates the very opposite of sex trafficking: “So sorry to disappoint you, however the truth must be told. I have only been able to find appropriate friends.” The writer also mentions having just left “the RN”; Andrew left the Royal Navy in July of that year.

None of this amounts to evidence of a crime. Being photographed with Jeffrey Epstein at a log cabin is not an offence. Neither is taking him shooting, though the grouse may feel differently.

The Balmoral inquiries are the latest in a remarkable year for the former Duke of York. In October last year the King stripped his brother of his royal titles, and he is now plain Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. On 19 February this year, Thames Valley Police arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office, over allegations that he passed confidential information to Epstein while serving as Britain’s trade envoy. He was questioned, released under investigation and has not been charged; he denies wrongdoing. The Metropolitan Police and Surrey Police are also examining material from the Epstein files. Sifting three million pages of American documents for anything that might amount to a British offence, the National Police Chiefs’ Council warns, will take time.

It will. I know, because I have spent the past six years doing something similar.

Since 2020 I have been investigating the Epstein affair, interviewing key witnesses, reading the court filings, the depositions, the flight logs, the unsealed documents and now the Justice Department’s vast release, and comparing what they actually say with what the newspapers say they say. The result is my book, Naked Lies. The most important thing I have learned is that the Epstein story has two layers: the documented one, of a convicted sex offender, a woman serving twenty years for trafficking and a great many rich people who should have known better; and the legend that has grown up around it, in which every name is a suspect, every photograph a confession and every claim a fact. Nowhere are the two more often confused than in the case of Andrew.

Which brings us to Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre, who took her own life in Western Australia in April last year, was the woman whose allegations did more than anyone’s to destroy Andrew’s public life. She said that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to have sex with him three times when she was 17: at Maxwell’s house in London in 2001, at Epstein’s mansion in New York, and at an orgy on Epstein’s Caribbean island, Little St James. Andrew denied it, insisted he had no recollection of ever meeting her, and in 2022 settled her civil lawsuit for a sum reported to run into millions, without admitting liability. Her story has since been treated by much of the press as settled fact. It is not, and it never was.

Consider New Mexico. In 2011 Giuffre wrote a 139-page manuscript, The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, which later entered the court record in her defamation action against Maxwell. In it, she described spending two days alone with Andrew at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch outside Santa Fe, riding horses with him and massaging him “at least a couple of times a day”. In it, she placed her third sexual encounter with Andrew not on a Caribbean island but at the ranch. “My third encounter with Prince Andrew,” she wrote, “occurred at Zorro Ranch.”

The trouble is that she had given a quite different account of where that encounter took place, and it was the island version that she maintained in her sworn statements and in public for the rest of her life. One of those accounts was untrue, and Giuffre knew which one. When the discrepancy was raised, her explanation was that a tabloid reporter had advised her to fictionalise parts of her story to avoid being sued. In 2019 her own lawyers conceded in a court filing that the manuscript was “fictionalized”. Even her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, published last October, opens with the claim that she had “never told my whole story”, despite the existence of the 139-page manuscript in which she told a different one.

New Mexico was not an isolated slip. Giuffre accused the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, repeatedly and in detail, of sexually abusing her, including in a Netflix documentary. In 2022, settling his defamation claim, she said she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him. She also named the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and the former Senate majority leader George Mitchell as men she had been directed to have sex with; both flatly denied ever meeting her, and neither was ever charged with anything. And she was not called as a witness at Maxwell’s trial, where her account would have been tested under cross-examination.

Thursday’s statement is “very early stage”. Police Scotland has received information. It has not said what that information is, or whether it can be corroborated, or whether it has anything to do with Andrew at all, rather than with Epstein and Maxwell. It may lead somewhere. It may lead nowhere, as so much of the Epstein material has.

Andrew’s judgement in staying friends with Epstein after his 2008 conviction was foolish, and his 2019 Newsnight interview remains a masterclass in how not to defend yourself. But bad judgement is not a crime, and nor is a shooting party in the Highlands. If detectives in Aberdeenshire find evidence that women were trafficked to Balmoral, those responsible should answer for it, whoever they are. If they do not, a great many people who have already decided otherwise will owe somebody an apology.

They will not, of course, offer one. In the Epstein affair, they never do.

Epstein in the Heather: Police Investigate…