The hilltop villa in the sleepy countryside hamlet of Alcalar, on the outskirts of Portimão in the western Algarve, is a picture of tranquillity.

Bathed in gentle winter sunshine the sprawling garden teams with blossoming flora and commands stunning views, from the sea in the south to the mountains in the north. It’s easy to see why Brenda Davidson fell in love with the property some 14 years ago.

Nothing but birdsong disturbs the peaceful atmosphere.

So it makes it all the more shocking to learn just how brutal the manner was in which Ms. Davidson’s life was taken on the property, her body hidden in the very garden which she spent hours lovingly tending.

“It’s very tragic to think of what happened to her, but for her retirement years I don’t think she could have had anything better. She loved it here. She’d spend hours and hours all day just pottering around doing things” Brenda’s son Dean Davidson, 49, one of four siblings, recalls.

Animal lover Brenda and her partner Nigel Jackson, a keen golfer 12 years her junior, moved to Portugal from the UK in 2002, after she retired from her job at John Lewis in Bluewater.

“She wanted to make a better life”, Dean tells of his mother, pointing out how, despite untroubled times in the earlier years, her relationship with Jackson, 60, had noticeably deteriorated.

Amid allegations of physical abuse the former policeman and father-of-two paints a picture of a relationship that appeared to have become increasingly controlling and isolated.

“I’ve probably been out to Portugal some 40 or 50 times since they got the house. It was only recently over the past few years that things got bad. I pleaded with her to go to the police at times but she was scared”, he says.

Dean claims what really struck him was how his mother’s friends, once regular visitors to the house, had dwindled off.

“During the first few years every day people would come and visit. Three or four people, every day. Then the last two years no one ever came up and I found that really strange”, he reflects.

Softly-spoken he continues,“The last time I saw my mum was on 18 June 2014. She took me to the airport; I’d just been out for a holiday. She usually had a few tears whenever I went back but this time she was crying her eyes out. It was her birthday.”

Around that same time Jackson had become romantically involved with another woman, a Portuguese university teacher named Vanessa.

Four months later, around November, Dean's contact with his mother became increasingly infrequent and out of character, raising his suspicion that the correspondence might be forged.

“I couldn’t get hold of her. I’d ring her mobile but it would just ring and ring.

“One day I got an email in which she said she was going off to Germany with her consultant from the hospital. It said that Nigel was staying in the villa to look after the animals. That’s when alarm bells really started ringing. The one thing mum had always said was, that if anything ever went wrong she would never leave Nigel the villa. Ever.”

Concerned for his mother’s whereabouts and welfare Dean contacted the authorities, and on 6 January 2015 Brenda Davidson’s body was found wrapped in tarpaulin and buried under rubble and concrete.

“I got a phone call at about 11 o’clock on January 6th. It was the Chief Inspector at Maidstone. He said, ‘can we come and see you?’ So I said, why? And they said, ‘we can’t tell you’. So they came out and when they arrived they said, ‘do you want to sit down?’ I asked, is it that bad? They said ‘yes, you should sit down’. So I sat down and they told me everything.”

A subsequent post mortem would find Brenda had suffered several blows to the back of her head and slashes to her face and neck.

The exact date and circumstances leading up the her death remain a mystery, but Jackson – who has maintained he did not kill his partner despite confessing to burying her “to fulfil her wishes” – told the court during his trial it was “the weekend Lewis Hamilton won the championships”, in November 2014.

Nigel Jackson’s version of events is that he found Brenda’s lifeless and blood-soaked body after returning from a round of golf.

He claims to believe she took her own life after becoming despondent with an ongoing struggle with cancer, and that he buried her body in the garden to fulfil her wishes that “she be buried with her babies”, deceased animals.

In court police experts quashed that theory, saying everything pointed towards a violent struggle having taken place and evidence was incompatible with suicide.

Last Thursday, Nigel Jackson was found guilty by a collective of three judges on all five charges of which he had been accused by the public prosecutor: murder, desecration of a body, larceny, IT and telecommunications fraud, and misuse of a credit card.

In a short 30-minute ruling he was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the presiding judge, the maximum term that can be handed out in Portugal.

Shaking his head as he was handcuffed and led off by police officers, Jackson expressed disagreement with the sentence.

It has yet to be seen whether he will appeal.

Now, standing in the villa’s serene garden, it is all the more disturbing to see just how shallow the grave in which Brenda’s body was – in the words of the court – “hidden”; a mere extension of a simple brick and cement base originally built to accommodate an above-ground pool.

Piles of furniture, children’s inflatable pool toys and other remnants of a life in the sun lay strewn across the garden for disposal.

“I don’t know if we’ll keep the house”, Dean elaborates, explaining while he’s happy to be in the garden his mother loved so much, he can’t bring himself to be in the villa.

He adds: “Up until Thursday it was just a case of concentrating on getting evidence to court and focusing on that really. Now that’s done, it’s been a few days, and I think we can start to move on. Tidy up, and try and make it nice again. It’s all I can do at the moment.”

Going over the past twelve months, Dean confides “it’s been really hard at times but the local community have been so supportive.”

And Dean hopes that his mother’s death might serve as a warning to women in tumultuous relationships.

Addressing the sentence handed to Jackson, Dean says “I vowed from day one to do my best for mum and get justice and I couldn’t ask for more in the circumstances.

“I would like to think Nigel will have time to reflect and maybe one day come forward and tell anybody or whoever what really happened. The exact truth. I think there’ll always be that; that until you know what really happened to someone, the questions are always there.

“He knows what happened to her”, Dean believes; “He’s got time to think now. The result [of the trial] was fantastic; we can start to move on. But for me personally it would be nice to know the truth. Whether we’ll ever get to know that in my lifetime, I don’t know. It would be nice to know one day what actually happened.”