Longshot

Chapter 10

I borrowed the Land Rover and at Doone’s request led him down to the village and into Harry and Fiona’s drive. I was surprised that he still wanted me with him and said so, and he explained a little solemnly that he found people felt less threatened by a police officer if he turned up with someone they knew.

‘Don’t you want them to feel threatened?’ I asked. ‘Many policemen seem to like it that way.’

‘I’m not many policemen.’ He seemed uninsulted. ‘I work in my own way, sir, and if sometimes it’s not how my colleagues work then I get my results all the same and it’s the results that count in the end. It may not be the best way to the highest promotion,’ he smiled briefly, ‘but I do tend to solve things, I assure you.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Chief Inspector,’ I said.

‘I have three daughters,’ he said, sighing, ‘and I don’t like cases like this one.’

We were standing in the drive looking at the noble facade of a fine Georgian manor.

‘Never make assumptions,’ he said absent-mindedly, as if giving me advice. ‘You know the two most pathetic words a policeman can utter when his case falls apart around him?’

I shook my head.

‘I assumed,’ he said.

‘I’ll remember.’

He looked at me calmly in his unthreatening way and said it was time to trouble the Goodhavens.

As it happened, only Fiona was there, coming to the kitchen door in a dark blue tailored suit with a white silk blouse, gold chains, high-heeled black shoes and an air of rush. She smiled apologetically when she saw me.

‘John,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you? I’m going out to lunch. Can you make it quick?’

‘Er...’ I said, ‘this is Detective Chief Inspector Doone, Thames Valley Police. And Constable Rich.’

‘Policemen?’ she asked, puzzled; and then in terrible flooding anxiety, ‘Nothing’s happened to Harry?’

‘No, no. Nothing. It’s not about Harry. Well, not exactly. It’s about Angela Brickell. They’ve found her.’

‘Angela...? Oh yes. Well, I’m glad. Where did she go?’

Doone was very adroit, I thought, at letting silence itself break the bad news.

‘Oh my dear,’ Fiona said, after a few quiet revelationary seconds, ‘is she dead?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so, madam.’ Doone nodded. ‘I need to ask you a few questions.’

‘Oh, but...’ She looked at her watch. ‘Can’t it wait? It’s not just a lunch, I’m the guest of honour.’

We were still standing on the doorstep. Doone without arguing produced the photograph and asked Fiona to identify the man, if she could.

‘Of course. It’s Harry, my husband. And that’s my horse, Chickweed. Where did you get this?’

‘From the young woman’s handbag.’

Fiona’s face was full of kindness and regret. ‘She loved Chickweed,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I could come back when your husband’s at home?’ Doone suggested.

Fiona was relieved. ‘Oh, yes, do that. After five tonight or tomorrow morning. He’ll be here until about... um... eleven, I should think, tomorrow. Bye, John.’

She hurried back into the house, leaving the door open, and presently, from beside our own cars, we saw her come out, lock the back door, hide the key under the stone (Tut, tut, Doone said disapprovingly) and drive away in a neat BMW, her blond hair shining, cheerful hand waving goodbye.

‘If you had to describe her in one word,’ Doone said to me, ‘what would it be?’

‘Staunch,’ I said.

‘That was quick.’

‘That’s what she is. Steadfast, I’d say.’

‘Have you known her long?’

‘Ten days, like the others.’

‘Mm.’ He pondered. ‘I won’t have ten days, not living in their community, like you do. I might ask you again what people here are really like. People sometimes don’t act natural when they’re with policemen.’

‘Fiona did. Surely everyone did who you’ve met this morning?’

‘Oh yes. But there’s some I haven’t met. And there are loyalties... I read the transcript of part of that trial before I came here. Loyalty is strong here, wouldn’t you agree? Staunch, steadfast loyalty, wouldn’t you say?’

Doone might look grey, I thought, and his chatty almost sing-song Berkshire voice might be disarming, but there was a cunningly intelligent observer behind the waffle, and I did suddenly believe, as I hadn’t entirely before, that usually he solved his cases.

He said he would like to speak to all the other stable girls before they heard the news from anyone else, and o the men, but the women first.

I took Doone and Rich to the house in the village which I knew the girls called their hostel, though I’d never been in it. It was a small modern house in a cul-de-sac, bought cheaply before it was built, Tremayne had told me, and appreciating nicely with the years. I explained to Doone that I didn’t know all the girls’ names: I saw them only at morning exercise and sometimes at evening stables.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘but they’ll all know you. You can tell them I’m not an ogre.’

I wasn’t any longer so sure about that but I did what he asked. He sat paternally on a flower-patterned sofa in the sitting-room, at home among the clutter of pot plants, satin cushions, fashion magazines and endless photographs of horses, and told them without drama that it looked possible Angela Brickell had died the day she hadn’t returned for evening stables. They had found her clothes, her handbag and her bones, he said, and naturally they were having to look into it. He asked the by now familiar questions: did they think Angela had been deeply involved in doping horses, and did they know if she’d had rows with her boyfriend.

Only four of the six girls had been employed at the yard in Angela’s time, they said. She definitely hadn’t been doping horses; they found the idea funny. She wasn’t bright enough, one of them said unflatteringly. She hadn’t been their close friend. She was moody and secretive, they all agreed, but they didn’t know of any one steady boyfriend. They thought Sam had probably had her, but no one should read much in that. Who was Sam? Sam Yaeger, the stable jockey, who rode more than the horses.

There were a few self-conscious giggles. Doone, father of three daughters, interpreted the giggles correctly and looked disillusioned.

‘Did Angela and Sam Yaeger quarrel?’

‘You don’t quarrel with Sam Yaeger,’ the brightest of them said boldly. ‘You go to bed with him. Or in the hay.’

Gales of giggles.

They were all in their teens, I thought. Light-framed, hopeful, knowing.

The bold girl said, ‘But no one takes Sam seriously. It’s just a bit of fun. He makes a joke of it. If you don’t want to, you just say no. Most of us say no. He’d never try to force anyone.’

The others looked shocked at the idea. ‘It’s casual with him, like.’

I wondered if Doone were thinking that maybe with Angela it hadn’t been casual after all.

The bold girl, whose name was Tansy, asked when they’d found the poor little bitch.

‘When?’ Doone considered briefly. ‘Someone noticed her last Sunday morning. Mind you, he wasn’t in a great hurry to do anything because he could see she’d been lying there peacefully a long time, but then he phoned us and the message reached me late Sunday afternoon while I was sleeping off my wife’s Yorkshire pudding — great grub, that is — so Monday I went to see the lass and we started trying to find out who she was, because we have lists of missing people, runaways mostly, you see? Then yesterday we found her handbag, and it had this photo in it, so I came over this morning to check if she was the missing stable girl on our missing persons list. So I should think you could say we really found her this morning.’

His voice had lulled them into accepting him on friendly terms and they willingly looked at the photograph he passed round.

‘That’s Chickweed,’ they said, nodding.

‘You’re sure you can tell one horse from another?’

‘Of course you can,’ they said, ‘when you see them every day.’

‘And the man?’

‘Mr Goodhaven.’

Doone thanked them and tucked the photo away again. Rich took slow notes, none of the girls paying him any attention.

Doone asked if by any chance Angela Brickell had owned a dog. The girls, mystified, said no. Why would he think so? They’d found a dog’s collar near her, he explained, and a well-chewed ball. None of them had a dog, Tansy said.

Doone rose to go and told them if anything occurred to them, to send him a message.

‘What sort of thing?’ they asked.

‘Well now,’ he said kindly. ‘We know she’s dead, but we want to know how and why. It’s best to know. If you were found dead one day, you’d want people to know what happened, wouldn’t you?’

Yes, they nodded, they would.

‘Where did she go?’ Tansy asked.

Doone as near as dammit patted her head, but not quite. I thought that that would have undone all his good fatherly work. Willing they might be, but feminists all, too smart to be patronised.

‘We have to do more tests first, miss,’ he said obscurely. ‘But soon we hope to make a statement.’

They all accepted that easily enough and we said our goodbyes, travelling back through the village to a bungalow nearer Bob Watson’s house, where the unmarried lads lived.

The living-room in the lads’ hostel, in sharp contrast to the girls’, was plantless, without cushions and was grubbily scattered with newspapers, empty beer cans, pornography, dirty plates and muddy boots. Only the televisions and video players in both places looked the same.

The lads all knew that Angela Brickell had been found dead as one of them had learned it from Bob Watson. None of them seemed to care about her personally (exactly like the girls) and they too had no information and few opinions about her.

‘She rode all right,’ one of them said, shrugging.

‘She was a bit of a hot pants,’ said another.

They identified Chickweed’s picture immediately and one of them asked if he could have the photo when the police had done with it.

‘Why?’ Doone asked.

‘Because I look after the old bugger now, that’s why. Wouldn’t mind having a snap of him.’

‘Better take another one,’ Doone advised him. ‘By rights this belongs to the lass’s parents.’

‘Well,’ he later demanded of me, after we’d left. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s your job to think,’ I protested.

He half smiled. ‘There’s a long way to go yet. If you think of anything, you tell me. I’ll listen to everything anyone wants to say. I’m not proud. I don’t mind the public telling me the answers. Make sure everyone knows that, will you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

The telephone in Shellerton House began ringing that afternoon in a clamour that lasted for days. However reticent Doone had been, the news had spread at once like a bush fire through the village that another young woman connected with Tremayne Vickers’ house and stables had been found dead. Newspapers, quickly informed, brusquely demanded to be told where, when and why. Dee-Dee repeated and repeated that she didn’t know until she was almost in tears. I took over from her after a while and dispensed enormous courtesy and goodwill but no facts, of which, at the time anyway, I knew very few.

I worked on the book and answered the phone most of Friday and didn’t see Doone at all, but on Saturday I learned that he had spent the day before scattering fear and consternation.

Tremayne had asked if I would prefer to go to Sandown with Fiona, Harry and Mackie, saying he thought I might find it more illuminating: he himself would be saddling five runners at Chepstow and dealing with two lots of demanding owners besides. ‘To be frank, you’d be under my feet. Go and carry things for Mackie.’

With old-fashioned views, which Mackie herself tolerated with affection, he persisted in thinking pregnant women fragile. I wondered if Tremayne understood how little Perkin would like my carrying things for Mackie and determined to be discreet.

‘Fiona and Harry are taking Mackie,’ Tremayne said, almost as if the same thought had occurred to him. ‘I’ll check that they’ll take you too, though it’s a certainty if they have room.’

They had room. They collected Mackie and me at the appointed time and they were very disturbed indeed.

Harry was driving. Fiona twisted round in the front seat to speak to Mackie and me directly and with deep lines of worry told us that Doone had paid two visits to them the day before, the first apparently friendly and the second menacing in the extreme.

‘He seemed all right in the morning,’ Fiona said. ‘Chatty and easy-going. Then he came back in the evening...’ She shivered violently, although it was warm in the car, ‘...and he more or less accused Harry of strangling that bloody girl.’

‘What?’ Mackie said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Doone doesn’t think so,’ Harry said gloomily. ‘He says she was definitely strangled. And did he show you that photo of me with Chickweed?’

Mackie and I both said yes.

‘Well, it seems he got it enlarged. I mean, blown up really big. He said he wanted to see me alone, without Fiona, and he showed me the enlargement which was just of me, not the horse. He asked me to confirm that I was wearing my own sunglasses in the photo. I said of course I was. Then he asked me if I was wearing my own belt, and I said of course. He asked me to look carefully at the buckle. I said I wouldn’t be wearing anyone else’s things. Then he asked me if the pen clipped onto the racecard I was holding in the photo was mine also... and I got a bit shirty and demanded to know what it was all about.’ He stopped for a moment, and then in depression went on. ‘You won’t believe it... but they found my sunglasses and my belt and my gold pen lying with that girl, wherever she was, and Doone won’t tell us where for some God-silly reason. I don’t know how the hell those things got there. I told Doone I hadn’t seen any of them for ages and he said he believed it. He thought they’d been with Angela Brickell all these months... that I’d dropped them when I was with her.’

He stopped again, abruptly, and at that point added no more.

Fiona, in a strong mixture of indignation and alarm, said, ‘Doone demanded to know precisely where Harry had been on the day that girl went missing and also he said he might want to take Harry’s fingerprints.’

‘He thinks I killed her,’ Harry said. ‘It’s obvious he does.’

‘It’s ridiculous,’ Mackie repeated. ‘He doesn’t know you.’

‘Where were you on that day?’ I asked. ‘I mean, you might have a perfect alibi.’

‘I might have,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know where I was. Could you say for certain what you were doing on the Tuesday afternoon of the second week of June last year?’

‘Not for sure,’ I said.

‘If it had been the third week,’ Harry said, ‘we’d have been at Ascot races. Royal Ascot. Tarted up in top hats and things.’

‘We keep a big appointments diary,’ Fiona said fiercely. ‘I dug up last year’s. There’s nothing listed at all on that second Tuesday. Neither of us can remember what we were doing.’

‘No work?’ I suggested. ‘No meetings?’

Harry and Fiona simultaneously said no. Fiona was on a couple of committees for good causes, but there’d been no meetings that day. Harry, whose personal fortune seemed to equal Fiona’s in robust good health, had in the past negotiated the brilliant sale of an inherited tyre-making company (so Tremayne had told me) and now passed his time lucratively as occasional consultant to other private firms looking for a golden corporate whale to swallow them. He couldn’t remember any consultations for most of June.

‘We went to see Nolan ride Chickweed at Uttoxeter near the end of May,’ Fiona said worriedly. ‘Angela was there looking after the horse. That was the day someone fed him theobromine and caffeine, and if she didn’t give Chickweed chocolate herself then she must have let someone else do it. Sheer negligence, probably. Anyway, Chickweed won and Angela went back to Shellerton with him and we saw her a few days later and gave her an extra present, as we were so pleased with the way she looked after the horse. I mean, a horse’s success is always partly due to whoever cares for it and grooms it. And I can’t remember seeing the wretched girl again after that.’

‘Nor can I,’ Harry said.

They went over and over the same old ground all the way to Sandown and it was clear they had spoken of little else since Doone’s devastating identification of Harry’s belongings.

‘Someone must have put those things there to incriminate Harry,’ Mackie said unhappily.

Fiona agreed with her, but it appeared that Doone didn’t.

Harry said, ‘Doone believes it was an unpremeditated murder. I asked him why and he just said that most murders were unpremeditated. Useless. He said people who commit unpremeditated murder often drop things from extreme agitation and don’t know they’ve dropped them. I said I couldn’t even remember ever talking to the girl except in the company of my wife and he simply stared at me, not believing me. I’ll tell you, pals, it was unnerving.’

‘Awful,’ Mackie said vehemently. ‘Wicked.’

Harry, trying to sound balanced, was clearly horribly disconcerted and was driving without concentration, braking and accelerating jerkily. Fiona said they had thought of not going to Sandown as they weren’t in a fun-day mood, but they had agreed not to let Doone’s suspicions ruin everything. Doone’s suspicions were nevertheless conspicuously wrecking their equilibrium and it was a subdued little group that stood in the parade ring watching Fiona’s tough hunter, the famous Chick-weed, walk round before the Wilfred Johnstone Hunter Chase.

No one, one hoped, had given him chocolate.

Fiona had told Nolan about Doone’s accusations. Nolan told Harry that now he, Harry, knew what it was like to have a charge of murder hanging over him he would in retrospect have more sympathy for him, Nolan. Harry didn’t like it. With only vestiges of friendliness he protested that he, Harry, had not been found with a dead girl at his feet.

‘As good as, by the sound of things,’ Nolan said, rattled.

‘Nolan!’ Fiona wasn’t amused. ‘Everyone, stop talking about it. Nolan, put your mind on the race. Harry, not another word about that bloody girl. Everything will be sorted out. We’ll just have to be patient.’

Harry gave her a fond but rueful glance and, over her shoulder, caught my eye. There was something more in his expression, I thought, and after a moment identified it as fear: maybe faint, but definitely present. Harry and fear hadn’t, until then, gone together in my mind, particularly not since his controlled behaviour in a frozen ditch.

Mackie, in loco Tremayne, saw Nolan into the saddle and the four of us walked towards the stands to see the race. With Mackie and Fiona in front, Harry fell into step beside me.

‘I want to tell you something,’ he said, ‘but not Fiona.’

‘Fire away.’

He looked quickly around him, checking no one could hear.

‘Doone said... Christ... he said the girl had no clothes on when she died.’

‘God, Harry.’ I felt my mouth still open, and closed it consciously.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.

‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Doone asked what I was doing there with my belt off.’

The shock still trembled in his voice.

‘The innocent aren’t found guilty,’ I protested.

He said miserably, ‘Oh, yes, they are. You know they are.’

‘But not on such flimsy evidence.’

‘I haven’t been able to tell Fiona. I mean, we’ve always been fine together, but she might start wondering... I don’t honestly know how I’d bear that.’

We reached the stands and went up to watch, Harry falling silent in his torturing troubles amid the raucous calls of bookmakers and the enfolding hubbub of the gathering crowd. The runners cantered past on their way to the starting gate, Nolan looking professional as usual on the muscly chestnut that Fiona had ridden all autumn out hunting. Chickweed, Mackie had told me, was Fiona’s especial pet: her friend as much as her property. Chickweed, circling and lining up, running in the first hunter chase of the spring season, was going to win three or four times before June, Tremayne hoped.

We were joined at that point by pudgy unfit Lewis, who panted that he had only just arrived in time and asked if the Jockey Club had said anything about Nolan going on riding.

‘Not a word,’ Fiona said. ‘Fingers crossed.’

‘If they were going to stop him,’ Lewis opined judiciously, taking deep breaths, ‘they’d surely have let him know by today, so perhaps the expletive sod’s got away with it.’

‘Brotherly love,’ Fiona remarked ironically.

‘He owes me,’ Lewis said darkly and with such growling intensity that all of us, I thought, recognised the nature of the debt, even if some hadn’t wanted to believe it earlier.

‘And will you collect?’ Harry asked, his sarcasm showing.

‘No thanks to you,’ Lewis replied sharply.

‘Perjury’s not my best act.’

Lewis smiled like a snake, all fangs.

‘I,’ he said, ‘am the best bleep bleep actor of you all.’

Fiona starkly faced the certainty that Lewis had not after all been too drunk to see straight when Olympia died. Mackie’s clear face was pinched with dismay. Harry, who had known all along, would have shrugged off Lewis’s admission philosophically were it not for his own ominous future.

‘What would you have me do?’ Lewis demanded, seeing the general disapproval. ‘Say he called her every filthy name in the book and shook her by the neck until her eyes popped out?’

‘Lewis!’ Fiona exclaimed, not believing him. ‘Shut up.’

Lewis gave me a mediumly hostile glance and wanted to know why I was always hanging around. No one answered him, me included.

Fiona said, ‘They’re off a split second before the official announcement and concentrated through her raceglasses.

‘I asked you an expletive question,’ Lewis said to me brusquely.

‘You know why,’ I replied, watching the race.

‘Tremayne isn’t here,’ he objected.

‘He sent me to see Sandown.’

Chickweed was easy to spot, I discovered, with the white blaze down his chestnut face that so clearly distinguished him in the photograph nodding away on the rails at every galloping step. The overall pace seemed slower to me than the other races I’d watched, the jumping more deliberate; but it wasn’t, as Tremayne had warned me, an easy track even for the sport’s top performers, and for hunters a searching test. ‘Watch them jump the seven fences down the far side,’ he’d said. ‘If a horse meets the first one right, the others come in his stride. Miss the first, get it wrong, legs in a tangle, you might as well forget the whole race. Nolan is an artist at meeting that first fence right.’

I watched particularly. Chickweed flew the first fence and all the next six down the far side, gaining effortless lengths. ‘There’s nothing like the hunting field for teaching a horse to jump,’ Tremayne had said. ‘The trouble is, hunters aren’t necessarily fast. Chickweed is, though. So was Oxo who won the Grand National years back.’

Chickweed repeated the feat on the second circuit and then, a length in front of his nearest pursuer, swept round the long bend at the bottom end of the course and straightened himself for the third fence from home — the Pond fence, so called because the small hollow beside it had once been wet, though now held mostly reeds and bushes.

‘Oh, come on,’ Fiona said explosively, the tension too much. ‘Chicky Chickweed... jump it.’

Chicky Chickweed rose to it as if he’d heard her, his white blaze showing straight on to us before he veered right towards the second last fence and the uphill pull to home.

‘A lot of races are lost on the hill,’ Tremayne had told me. ‘It’s where stamina counts, where you need the reserves. Any horse that has enough left to accelerate there is going to win. Same at Cheltenham. A race at either place can change dramatically after the last fence. Tired horses just fade away, even if they’re in the lead.’

Chickweed made short work of the second last fence but didn’t shake off his pursuer.

‘I can’t bear it,’ Fiona said.

Mackie put down her raceglasses to watch the finish, anxiety digging lines on her forehead.

It was only a race, I thought. What did it matter? I answered my own question astringently: I’d written a novel, what did it matter if it won or lost on its own terms? It mattered because I cared, because it was where I’d invested all thought, all effort. It mattered to Tremayne and Mackie the same way. Only a race... but also their skill laid on the line.

Chickweed’s pursuer closed the gap coming to the last fence.

‘Oh, no,’ Fiona groaned, lowering her own glasses. ‘Oh, Nolan, come on.’

Chickweed made a spectacular leap, leaving unnecessary space between himself and the birch, wasting precious time in the air. His pursuer, jumping lower in a flatter trajectory, landed first and was fastest away.

‘Damn,’ Harry said.

Fiona was silent, beginning to accept defeat.

Nolan had no such thoughts. Nolan, aggressive instincts in full flood, was crouching like a demon over Chickweed’s withers delivering the message that losing was unacceptable. Nolan’s whip rose and fell twice, his arm swinging hard. Chickweed, as if galvanised, reversed his decision to slow down now that he’d been passed and took up the struggle again. The jockey and horse in front, judging the battle won, eased up fractionally too soon. Chickweed caught them napping a stride from the winning post and put his head in front just where it mattered, the crowd cheering for him, the favourite, the fighter who never gave up.

It was Nolan, I saw, who had won that race. Nolan himself, not the horse. Nolan’s ability, Nolan’s character acting on Chickweed’s. Through Nolan I began to understand how much more there was to riding races than fearlessness and being able to stay in the saddle. More than tactics, more than experience, more than ambition. Winning races, like survival, began in the mind.

Fiona, triumphant where all had looked lost, breathless and shiny-eyed, hurried ahead with Mackie to meet the returning warriors. Lewis, Harry and I pressed along in their wake.

‘Nolan’s a genius,’ Harry was saying.

‘The other expletive jockey threw it away,’ Lewis had it.

Never assume, I thought, thinking of Doone. Never assume you’ve won until you hold the prize in your hand.

Doone was assuming things, I thought Not taking his own advice. Or so it seemed.

We all went for a celebratory drink, though in Mackie’s case it was ginger ale. Harry ordered the obligatory bubbles, his heart in his boots. Nolan was as high as Fiona, Lewis a grudging applauder. I, I supposed, an observer, still on the outside looking in. Six of us in a racecourse bar smiling in unison while the cobweb ghosts of two young women set traps for the flies.

We arrived back at Shellerton before Tremayne returned from Chepstow. Fiona dropped Mackie off at her side of the house and I walked round to Tremayne’s, unlocking the door with the key he’d given me and switching on lights.

There was a message from Gareth on the family room corkboard: ‘GONE TO MOVIE. BACK FOR GRUB.’ Smiling, I kicked the hot logs together and blew some kindling sticks to life with the bellows to revive the fire and poured some wine and felt at home.

A knock on the back door drew me from comfort to see who it was, and I didn’t at first recognise the young woman looking at me with a shy enquiring smile. She was pretty in a small way, brown haired, self-effacing... Bob Watson’s wife, Ingrid.

‘Come in,’ I said warmly, relieved to have identified her. ‘But I’m the only one home.’

‘I thought maybe Mackie. Mrs Vickers...’

‘She’s round in her own house.’

‘Oh. Well...’ She came over the threshold tentatively and I encouraged her into the family room where she stood nervously and wouldn’t sit down.

‘Bob doesn’t know I’m here,’ she said anxiously.

‘Never mind. Have a drink?’

‘Oh no. Better not.’

She seemed to be screwing herself up to something, and out it all finally came in a rush.

‘You were ever so kind to me that night. Bob reckons you saved me from frostbite at the least... and pneumonia, he said. Giving me your own clothes. I’ll never forget it. Never.’

‘You looked so cold,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you won’t sit down?’

‘I was hurting with cold.’ She again ignored the chair suggestion. ‘I knew you’d come back just now... I saw Mrs Goodhaven’s car come up the road... I came to talk to you, really. I’ve got to tell someone, I think, and you’re... well... easiest.’

‘Go on then. Talk. I’m listening.’

She said in a small burst, unexpectedly, ‘Angela Brickell was a Roman Catholic, like I am.’

‘Was she?’ The news meant very little.

Ingrid nodded. ‘It said on the local radio news tonight that Angela’s body was found last Sunday by a gamekeeper on the Quillersedge Estate. There was quite a bit about her on the news, about how the police were proceeding with their enquiries and all that. And it said foul play was suspected. They’re such stupid words, foul play. Why don’t they just say someone probably did her in? Anyway, after she’d vanished last year Mrs Vickers asked me to clear all her things out of the hostel and send them to her parents, and I did.’

She stopped, staring searchingly at my face for understanding.

‘What,’ I asked, feeling the way, ‘did you find in her belongings? Something that worries you... because she’s dead?’

Ingrid’s face showed relief at being invited to tell me.

‘I threw it away,’ she said. ‘It was a do-it-yourself home kit for a pregnancy test. She’d used it. All I found was the empty box.’