Written in Blood

Between the Lines

Joyce Barnaby stood over the gas stove, warmly wrapped in a candlewick dressing gown, splashing fat over an egg in the frying pan, netting the bright orange yolk with threads of white. All wrong of course - it should have been boiled, then shelled, but he had been too tired for dinner last night so she felt he was entitled to a little treat. The grilled bacon was very lean and he had already had his porridge - oats and bran mixed to lower the cholesterol and shoot him full of B vitamins.

‘Oh, cat!’ Attracted by the smell, Kilmowski, having already breakfasted exceedingly well, had rolled across the kitchen floor, dug his claws into Joyce’s robe and started to climb towards the source.

‘Get down ... Ow! That hurt.’ She unhooked the kitten, assembled the food on a warm plate and took it over to her husband.

‘We’re off the front page, thank goodness,’ he said, refolding the Independent. ‘If it hadn’t been for Jennings we’d never have been on it in the first place.’

‘He must have seen a paper by now. Perhaps he’ll get in touch today.’

Barnaby did not reply. He sat, regarding his breakfast, with deep dismay. ‘Isn’t it sausage this morning?’

‘Sausage Sunday.’ Joyce tapped her list of menus on the peg top notice board. ‘And you shouldn’t really have one then.’

‘One!’

‘If you’re lucky.’

He regarded her sternly. ‘Nobody’s indispensable, Joyce.’

‘Is that right?’ His wife picked up the coffee pot.

‘In Ancient Greece you could get a female slave for two spears.’

‘In Arbury Crescent wives who aren’t appreciated join the Open University And run off with their tutors.’

‘I hate this stuff.’ He scratched some mealy, wheyish paste across his toast. ‘No wonder they call it “virtually fat free”. You feel like a saint if you manage to keep it down.’

‘Stop moaning.’

‘Cough mixture, bicycle oil and fish paste.’

‘Kiki?’ Joyce clicked her tongue as she sat down and jiggled the pingpong ball tied with string to the back of her chair. ‘Ki-ki-ki ...’

‘Five minutes ago you were telling it off.’

‘Oh look, Tom.’ Joyce clapped her hands with pleasure. ‘Look at him play.’

‘Just keep it away from my bacon.’

‘He’s purring.’

‘Of course he’s purring - he’s a cat. What do you expect him to do? Break into a chorus from Rigoletto?’ Barnaby watched his wife sourly. ‘It’s only here till they get back - all right?’

‘I know that.’ Joyce poured the coffee. ‘Why are you being so horrid? It’s not my fault you can’t stop eating.’

‘Thanks.’ Barnaby took his cup. ‘Where’s your breakfast?’

‘I’ll have something later.’ She stirred her drink awkwardly, the spoon in her left hand. Kilmowski, wide eyed, was clinging to her right arm like a small alarmed muff. His grey silk belly, engorged with milk, bulged.

‘Look at that. Stuffed to the gills.’

‘Tom?’

‘Mm.’ He munched morosely on his final crust.

‘You are sticking to your diet?’

‘Yes.’

‘At work I mean.’

‘Oh God, Joycey - don’t nag.’

‘It’s important. You know what they said at your medical.’

‘Mmm.’ He drained his coffee and wheezed to his feet. ‘What are we having tonight again?’

‘Lamb’s liver with herbs and mushrooms.’

‘Don’t forget to buy fresh marjoram.’ In the hall Barnaby’s daughter gazed up at him, gravely beautiful in white bonnet and severe dress, from the doormat. He picked up the Radio Times took it in to his wife and kissed her goodbye.

‘Take care driving, love.’

‘Yes. I think I’ll put the chains on.’

‘Make sure you’re well wrapped up. It’s snowing.’

Sue hovered around her daughter like a bird with a single fledgling. Amanda was propped up against the sink, chewing one of her mother’s bran and walnut cookies and wishing it was a Dime bar. Today everything was black - skirts, tights, sneakers, eye liner, nails. Her hair, unwashed for many a long day, was piled into a dry pyramid.

‘It’s not snowing. These things are so shitty.’ She walked over to the waste bin and emptied her mouth. ‘Why can’t we have proper cake like everyone else?’

Two reasons actually. One: they were full of suspicious substances, many listed in Sue’s E for Additives book. Two: cash. There was never enough. Although Brian always seemed to be able to drum up money for his own indulgences, the latest being a director’s chair along the back of which he was now stencilling his name, he was very tight indeed when it came to the housekeeping. Expecting a hot meal every evening and a roast for Sunday lunch, he gave his wife barely enough for a week of cooked breakfasts.

All Sue’s play-group wages, such as they were, disappeared into the fund and still she could barely manage. She had asked for more, of course, but Brian had refused, saying she was as incompetent at handling his hard-earned salary as she was at everything else and that any increase would simply be frittered away. At the last time of asking he had lost his temper and vowed to solve the problem ‘once and for all’.

That weekend she had handed over her thirty pounds and Brian had gone shopping with her, marching up and down the aisle at Causton’s main supermarket and throwing stuff into a trolley to the running accompaniment of a grandiloquent directive.

‘See? This is an excellent buy - three for the price of two. And here’s rump steak on special offer - why don’t we ever have steak if it’s this cheap? Melon down again. And grapes. And look - Bulgarian Merlot only two forty-five ...’

At the checkout the bill came to fifty-three pounds. Brian, so sure of his ability to balance the books that he had not brought his credit card, had to stand, crimson with rage and humiliation, while a supervisor was called. A second trolley was wheeled alongside to take all the things that Brian could not afford back to the shelves. The very long queue had not been sympathetic. In the car park he had really let rip.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? You know how much things cost.’ He stowed the cardboard boxes in the boot and slammed it. ‘God knows how people on the Social manage to eat and smoke as well.’

‘They live on cardboard pizzas, oven chips and tins past their sell-by date,’ replied Sue, not quite managing to keep the satisfaction from her voice and being made to regret it all the way home.

‘Mandy? Mand?’ He was calling now from the front step. The door was wide open, transforming the cosy kitchen into an ice box. ‘Time for the bus.’

‘Awri.’ Mandy shrouded herself in a funereal horse blanket, flung the dark, dreary folds about a bit and picked up her Snoopy lunch box.

‘Make sure you have a hot drink with that. Not just pop.’

‘I might go to my nan’s after school.’

‘Oh. Thank you for letting me know.’ Sue gave the smile that constant disparagement had made a little foolish. ‘Bye-bye then.’

The door banged and they were gone. Sue felt, as she always did at such moments, immense relief slightly tinged with guilt. She put a few bits of coal into the greedy Aga, in situ when they had bought the place and always on the point of being given its marching orders, and drew the old armchair up close.

The house settled round her, silent and comforting. She breathed in and out slowly, calming down, letting go of the miserable sense of oppression that never left her when the family were present.

Family! What a misnomer that was. Whilst Sue was not foolish enough to be taken in by the sickly radiance of the cereal-crunching simpletons in television commercials, she was sure that, between their phoney jollity and the isolating and loveless desolation pervading Trevelyan Villas, there must somewhere exist a golden mean. Mothers and fathers and children who both argued with and supported each other, loved and hated each other, helped each other out in times of trouble and united fiercely at the merest hint of outside criticism.

She wondered, as she frequently did even when telling herself not to, if there had been a point somewhere in the past where she could have chosen a different path. She had got pregnant - so what? It had been 1982 - not the thirties when single mothers were practically stoned in the street. She could have resisted her parents’ pressure and that of the Claptons, terrified lest the neighbours discover that their son had got his ‘fiancée’ into trouble. Brian, newly in lust (for Sue had ‘fallen’ for Amanda the first time they had gone to bed), seemed very keen and, of course, an abortion was out of the question.

Sue had always loved children and had hoped one day to have at least four. When Amanda was a baby Sue had been as close to perfect happiness as she had ever known. Bathing and dressing her daughter, playing with her, teaching her to walk. Simply loving her. Even Brian’s rapidly souring demeanour and the start of his assertions that she had deliberately trapped him into marriage were rendered harmless by this golden centre to her life.

But then, gradually, everything had changed. Brian’s parents, only five miles away and doting on their only grandchild, demanded more and more of her time. Brian would drive over there every weekend, sometimes leaving Amanda for the whole two days. She would always return with an armful of presents, tired, fretful and sick from too many sweets.

At first, loving her daughter more than she feared her husband’s displeasure, Sue had argued against the duration and frequency of these visits. Perhaps one trip a month would be more suitable, just for the afternoon? And why shouldn’t they all go?

These suggestions had provoked endless rows, with Mrs Clapton insisting that Susan was trying to turn little Mandy against them and Mr Clapton begging everyone to keep their voices down as noise travelled in the summer even over the sound of lawn mowers. Amanda had screamed and yelled and kicked to demonstrate her own preference and, once having got the hang of the telephone, screamed and sobbed down that as well, leaving her devoted nanna quite heartbroken over the poor mite’s cruel deprivations.

Of course Sue gave way. It wasn’t hard, for the three of them had so firmly annexed the child that she sensed the battle lost before it was even properly engaged. Also she had, by then, started the village play group and was surrounded every day by toddlers with tears that needed mopping, grazes to be kissed better, tempers that had to be restrained and, most satisfying of all, ears yearning for stories.

This reflection brought Sue back to the present with a start. She jumped up to turn the clock round but it was all right, there was half an hour yet. She opened the cupboard under the stairs where she kept her paints and fabric trimmings, stuffing and glue. The night before she had completed ten finger puppets made from Tampax cylinders - brilliantly coloured monkeys and hobgoblins, witches and dinosaurs. She fixed an anteater, insolently sneering down an endless snout, to her little finger, waggled him about and imagined the children’s faces when all ten magically appeared as if from nowhere, nodding and chattering to them all.

Having packed her box Sue sat down again and ran through her check list. Pick up squash from village shop. Remind Mrs Harris she was on biscuits next week. Ask Marie Bennet if her husband would have a look at the electric kettle. Contact Rex.

She had called at the house again yesterday evening and was sure that he was in, for she heard Montcalm bark, but no one came to the door. This was not at all like Rex for, apart from his precious writing period, he was always delighted to see people, sometimes to a degree where it was hard to get away.

Post! Begging aloud, ‘Methuen, Methuen, let it be Methuen’, Sue ran into the hall. But it was only a notice of a coming sale from the shop where Brian had bought his camcorder.

By nine thirty a.m. Barnaby, having absorbed the scenes-of-crime report, was once more in the incident room passing on its disappointing conclusions to his investigative team.

‘The only prints on the murder weapon are those of the cleaner, Mrs Bundy. One quite clear, the rest smudged, presumably by whoever picked it up and used it to batter Hadleigh’s head in. They wore gloves, leather rather than a knitted fabric. SOCO can’t tell us about rogue prints yet. They’re still eliminating. We’ve now got everyone’s dabs except those of Mrs Lyddiard, who’s too cowed to defy her sister-in-law, and Honoria herself who has flatly refused.’

‘Someone should tell her just how important this is,’ said Inspector Meredith, adding, with quick prudence, ‘sir.’

‘Indeed,’ replied Barnaby, letting slip a wintry smile. ‘Perhaps, as you are in the village, that is something you could take upon yourself, inspector?’

‘I’d be glad to, chief inspector.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Barnaby, his smile now containing rather more satisfaction, returned to the matter in hand, ‘there’s no result from Hadleigh’s nails at all. Neither skin, hair, nor fibres, so it appears that at no point did he fight back. It’s difficult to believe that he deliberately chose not to, so I think we can assume that Doctor Bullard was right and that first blow which, presumably, was totally unexpected, either killed him outright or left him helpless.

‘Slightly more luck with the chest of drawers. They were lined with a waxy paper, which didn’t help matters, but there was a small amount of dust containing particles of cashmere, pale blue in colour, which seems to indicate it was used to store sweaters or cardigans. Hardly a thrilling revelation I’m afraid. The results on Jennings’ shoes are completely negative. No footprints in the garden. Even the ones we might have expected to find from Laura Hutton have been washed away, thanks to the weather.

‘No luck with the ports telex. Jennings has not left the country, either with or without his Mercedes, via any of them. At least not under that name. But we have a result on the taxi. A Mr’ - he glanced down at his notes - ‘Winston Mogani was in the rank on the evening of the sixth when, just before ten thirty, a woman got in and asked him to drive to Midsomer Worthy. She didn’t give him an address. Just told him the way as they entered the village. They didn’t talk. She made no effort; he had his two-way radio on. Asked to describe the woman, Mr Mogani said he had people in and out of his cab all day and unless they looked like Whitney Houston he gave them no mind. This woman was fair and middle-aged although, as Mr Mogani is still in his teens, that could mean anything over thirty.

‘So far we haven’t been able to trace the driver who took her back, so you’ll have to move out from Uxbridge proper and cover the villages between there and Midsomer. It’s likely that Hadleigh would have called someone nearby. Try the Yellow Pages and, on the offchance that this woman may have been a prostitute, I’d like a thorough check on and behind the streets. Clubs, massage parlours, small ads, the lot.

‘I would also like questions asked around the village to see if anyone recalls the name of the company who moved Hadleigh. It’s a long shot but you never know.’

‘Wouldn’t be local would it, chief inspector?’ asked DC Willoughby, looking even more crackly crisp than he had yesterday. Even his smile was freshly ironed. ‘More likely someone from the Kent end.’

‘As I say, constable, a long shot. I’m hoping today, if the electoral register coughs up, we shall discover exactly where he did originally live. To end on a slightly jollier note, we’ve struck lucky with the conveyancing solicitor, who does seem to have handled other business for the dead man. I shall be seeing Mr Jocelyne later this morning. He may be keeping the documents that one would normally have expected to find at Plover’s Rest and with a bit of luck these might include the marriage certificate.’

‘How do you see that as relevant, sir?’ asked WPC Brierley. ‘Do you think there might be a link between the two deaths?’

‘I have no idea at this stage,’ replied Barnaby. ‘But guessing at unknown connections and possibilities is an important part of any investigative process. Or should be.’

‘Oh absolutely, sir.’

‘And Grace’s demise can be said to have given us the opportunity to observe Hadleigh behaving in a very unusual way.’ Barnaby paused and worked his bushy eyebrows, canvassing a response.

Sergeant Troy, assessing, with an accuracy born of long practice, his chances of toughing out the answer to this subtle suggestion, gave up before he started and amused himself by watching the others. Especially Meredith of the Yard, furiously chewing his lips and tuckering his forehead. Barnaby pointed his interrogative gaze directly at the inspector and waited for what could have been construed as an insultingly long time before continuing:

‘Hadleigh has been described by everyone we have spoken to, without exception, as a very reserved person. Rex St John has explained how desperately embarrassed he was when compelled to ask for help over this Jennings business. So why did this self-protecting, exceptionally private, buttoned-up man tell so many people about the most painful and intimate event in his life. An event so distressing that he could no longer bear to live in that part of the country where it occurred.’

‘You mean his wife’s death, sir?’ asked Troy.

‘I do, yes.’

‘Well,’ Inspector Meredith said, determined not to lose out twice. ‘I suppose because he wanted them to know.’

‘Oh, it’s more than that,’ replied Barnaby. ‘If we take into account what the revelation must have cost a man of his temperament I would say that he needed them to know. And what we must now ask ourselves, Inspector Meredith, is why?’

As Sue was buying her orange squash and Barnaby and Troy were about to set off for the solicitor’s office, Laura was squinting dully at her Filofax and realising that, in less than an hour, she was due to open the Spinning Wheel to receive a double-fronted Irish linen cupboard. She had bought this several days ago and it had been too wide to go into her van. The previous owner was bringing it across from Lacey Green in his Land Rover. There was still time to put him off. Without thought she reached for the phone, dialled half the number, then put her finger on the rest.

If she didn’t go in, what else would she do? Wander distractedly through her doll’s house, unable to sit down for more than five minutes at a stretch, unable to read. She would certainly not switch on the television, for watching in the daytime had always struck her as depressingly seedy. She had no wish to join what she had always assumed was an audience composed of the elderly, house-bound mums or the long-term unemployed.

She had switched the radio on and off a dozen times. Radio Three played music that was either totally insipid or so rowdy it hurt her head. Radio Four offered rising young lunatics from Westminster swearing eternal fealty to the electorate with their hands on their wallets. When the unctuous pieties of Thought for the Day started she had almost thrown the transistor across the kitchen.

She had never appreciated before that it was possible to believe and disbelieve something at the same time. She knew Gerald was dead. The police had told her so. There was to be an inquest. The funeral, though yet to be arranged, would assuredly be taking place in the not too distant future. Only yesterday she had wretchedly accepted the fact herself.

So why was she now compellingly convinced that if she walked round to Plover’s Rest he would still be there to open the door and greet her in the same sad, stiff, over-courteous way he always had. Laura wondered, and not for the first time, if she would have loved him so much, and so persistently, had he not, from the very beginning, been wearing a Keep Off The Grass sign. Pointless to speculate.

These reflections drove her into the bathroom, where she showered, wrapped herself in a robe and looked for something to wear, but without any great enthusiasm. Baggy cossack trousers of sage wool, a mustard silk shirt, a capacious padded coat of ivory wool and leather. Knee high chestnut boots, amber beads, hair pulled through a black velvet chignon. A quick and skilful make-up followed by a spray of Cabochard. And all the while marvelling at herself and at the absolute ineradicability of routine.

She breakfasted on an ice-cold Fernet Branca. She still wasn’t hungry and was beginning to feel light-headed. She wondered if there was still alcohol in her blood and if it was safe to drive. She had eaten no solid food for three days, sure that, even if she prepared something, she would not be able to swallow. There was a permanent obstruction in her throat that only liquids over forty per cent proof seemed able to bypass.

She put the empty glass next to several shards of delicate china that had been placed carefully in the sink by that clodhopping policeman. What did he expect her to do with them? Get out the Araldite? God knows why he had chosen to make coffee in soup bowls. And Sèvres at that.

About to leave, Laura suddenly turned back and opened the door of the yellow-silk sitting room. It was full of winter colour, iron grey, cold. For the first time she saw the room as others - Barnaby for instance - might have done. Scaled down, so neatly arranged, prim really. Only the portrait had the quickness of life in it. The heavy folds of velvet at the young boy’s hip glowed even without the benefit of the gilded picture light. Moved by an impulse she could not understand Laura leaned forwards and laid her hand over the mournfully disturbed green eyes.

The telephone went. She let it be. It was probably only Sue. She had rung every day since the murder, inviting Laura round for coffee. Wishing to be kind no doubt, but there was something in Laura’s fastidious nature that jibed at picking over what would be, for her, extremely emotional pieces. Rehashing the evening that had ended with Gerald’s death, worrying away at the whys and wherefores. She was also afraid she would be unable to control her feelings and start weeping publicly for him.

It struck her that she would no longer have to go to the Writers Circle. She could never remember what she had said about her work from one meeting to the next and always expected someone to pick her up, but everyone was so interested in their own stuff this had never happened.

Stepping outside, she winced as the skin on her face contracted in the cold air. In the bird bath a wren, having quite misjudged the temperature, had leapt in for a quick splash and was now frantically skidding around on the ice in circles. Making a mental note to thaw the water when she got back, Laura creaked across the splintering puddles to unlock the garage.

The law firm of Jocelyne, Tibbles and Delaney occupied the ground floor of an elegant eighteenth-century town house. Part of a row of six and situated almost in the town centre, their backs pressed hard by St Bartholomew’s parish church. The door, painted liquorice and flanked by tubs of crocuses, shone like black glass. Some heritage-conscious soul had had the bright idea of restoring the approach to the house to its original surface of cobbles embedded in cement. They were hell on the feet and must have been responsible for many a turned ankle. Or so the chief inspector thought as he stumbled over them to mount the highly polished, and equally treacherous, front steps.

They were expected, and asked to wait by a stout middle-aged lady, also rather cobbly in appearance but with a warm, if slightly distracted, smile. She showed them into an ante-room. Very confidence-inducing with panelled walls, solid furniture and low tables holding heavy glass ashtrays and copies of the Law Quarterly Review. On one of the close-buttoned and tightly padded chairs a striped cat lay curled up fast asleep, its ears occasionally twitching. Troy nodded in its direction.

‘Must be Tibbles.’

‘Don’t mention cats to me.’

‘D’you think I’ve got time for a ciggie?’

‘No.’

Barnaby was right. Even as he spoke a section of the panels vanished inwards and Mr Jocelyne, a short man with a markedly pouty chest and tiny hands and feet, came towards them. Barnaby was reminded of a pigeon. Everything about the solicitor was grey - his pin-striped arms and legs, the soft, sparsely distributed curls of hair upon his head and the more wiry tufts springing from his ears. Even his nails had a blue-grey tinge. He looked bone dry, as if all his essential juices had recently been drained off, and rustled as he walked.

‘Ah - here you are!’ he cried, as if it had been them who were keeping him waiting. ‘Come along. Come along.’

Once they were seated, in an office almost as stuffy and boring as the anteroom, Mr Jocelyne settled himself behind a desk the size of a rugger pitch and almost disappeared. He said, ‘Appalling, appalling.’

Barnaby hoped the man wasn’t going to say everything twice or they’d be there till the cows came home. He assumed that Mr Jocelyne was referring to the murder of his client.

‘Good of you to dispense with the formalities, Mr Jocelyne.’

‘In a murder case, chief inspector. In a case of murder.’

Mr Jocelyne drew towards him a mottled box file that he had placed earlier roughly scrum half. He opened it and took out an envelope containing the will. As he unfolded the sheets of heavy parchment they crackled as sharply as if they were on fire. Smoothing them out, the solicitor began to read.

‘Mr Hadleigh’s instructions are that any properties that he should own at the time of his death plus all other monies accruing from his estate are to go equally to Emmanuel College, Cambridge and the Central St Martin’s School of Art and Design there to endow two scholarships in literature and art respectively for young people of outstanding talent but limited means. The will makes it plain that both these establishments have already been approached regarding this matter.’

‘Quite a lot of money involved then?’

‘Indeed yes. Mr Hadleigh spread his investments wisely. Global Unit Trusts, Fidelity Cash Accounts, Woolwich Tessa and Treasury Bonds. All in all around eight hundred thousand pounds. Excluding the value of the house of course.’

Barnaby, concealing his surprise, asked the date of the will.

‘February the thirteenth 1982. The only amendment has been a change of executor. When Mr Hadleigh moved to Midsomer Worthy he needed a local solicitor for the conveyancing and asked if we would handle his affairs in the event of his death.’

‘Who were the previous executors?’

‘The firm who drew up the will.’

‘Might I have their details please? And the address Mr Hadleigh gave at that time.’

Mr Jocelyne produced a pewter-coloured fountain pen from an inside pocket. He unscrewed the top, fitted it neatly but firmly on to the other end and produced a piece of scrap paper from a neat folder. After checking that it had already been used on one side he cleared his throat as if preparing to speak rather than write and scribbled a few lines. Then he doubled the note, doubled it again and handed the tiny square over.

‘Could I ask, Mr Jocelyne, how well you knew your client?’

‘I didn’t. He was here for the business I have just described and I haven’t seen him since.’

‘I see. His investments make up quite an elaborate portfolio. Do you happen to know if he used a financial adviser?’

‘No idea.’ Mr Jocelyne, apparently pleased with this unhelpful response, looked kindly on them both.

‘We understand, from what Mr Hadleigh himself gave out, that he moved here from Kent—’

‘Hardly my business where he came from, chief inspector,’ responded Mr Jocelyne happily. Then, in case there should be the slightest doubt, ‘No concern of mine.’

The less helpful he was able to be the warmer the solicitor’s manner became. After being compelled to answer several further questions with a brief negative he bordered almost upon the radiant. When the time came to bid farewell he positively beamed and a flash of silver, bright but well within Mr Jocelyne’s chosen colour range, sparkled between his front teeth.

As Barnaby opened the door he noticed a large framed photograph of three youngsters, two boys and a girl, dressed in vivid colours, laughing, full of beans. The girl was swinging upside down. They were so obviously having such a wonderful time that the chief inspector took a moment to look, for the sheer pleasure of it.

‘Your grandchildren, Mr Jocelyne?’

‘No.’ A trace of colour finally showed itself, a delicate bloom upon the bloodless cheeks. ‘That is my family. Taken on my daughter’s fifth birthday. Last month.’

‘What a goer.’ Troy was chuckling as the two men once more hobbled across the slush-covered pavement. ‘No wonder he looks as old as the century. Back to the car now is it?’

‘I could do with a warm-up. Let’s grab some coffee at Bunter’s.’

‘Bunter’s?’ Troy stared in surprise.

‘Why not?’

He knew why not but went just the same. They sat down in the genteel snug surrounded by copper kettles and hunting horns and horse brasses suspended from leather straps. The waitresses wore mid-calf length black dresses with aprons like white exclamation points and pleated, pie-crust headbands low on the forehead. But their faces were young and skilfully painted and they moved with just as much speed and efficiency as their confrères at McDonald’s.

The room was crowded and very warm, smelling of damp clothes, toast and freshly ground coffee. There was no truck in Bunter’s with all that fluffed-up nonsense sprinkled with grated chocolate. Proper EPNS pots, milk jugs and sugar basins with flowered cups and saucers and apostle spoons.

Troy poured for them both, adding three sugars to his cup before warming his fingers round it. Then he sat back, glancing with deep satisfaction over the pleated, half-mast cretonne curtains into the street. For what could be nicer than sitting comfortably in the warm and dry watching one’s fellows trudge, pinched and shivering, on their weary way. Not much, Troy conceded, though driving past a bus queue in torrential rain came pretty near. Especially if you could get really close to the gutter.

The waitress came up, said ‘’kyew’, placed an old-fashioned three-tier china cakestand on their table and departed. Barnaby closed his eyes, realised at once that he could hardly stay that way for the duration of his visit and opened them again, swearing he wouldn’t look.

Cakes. Great fat profiteroles oozing cream. Slices of neat chocolate, alternately white and dark, held together with the merest scattering of liqueur-soaked ratafia crumbs. Cauliflowers of green marzipan, the curd made from ground almonds bound with honey and rose water. Squares of rich shortbread studded with almonds and smothered with fudge. Millefeuilles layered with freshly puréed raspberries instead of jam, and crème pâtissière. Lemon and orange jumbles drenched in powdered sugar. Vanilla meringues supreme, moist little curls of chestnut purée peeping out. Frangipanes.

‘Yum, yum,’ said Sergeant Troy. He helped himself to what looked like a small raft of shiny pastry coated with coffee icing and supporting two large swirls of soft, toffee nougat. ‘Do you want some more coffee, chief?’

‘Um ...’ Barnaby was studying the top plate, the smallest ring on this ziggurat of divine temptation. He figured things should be less fattening on this level. For a start they had to be ... well ... smaller. The thing to do was not look down.

Troy assumed the ‘um’ meant yes, and poured. Barnaby helped himself to two thinnish circles of biscuit sandwiched together by a fawn-coloured paste.

‘That doesn’t look very interesting.’

‘It’s interesting enough for me,’ said the chief inspector, biting into it. Oh, God - pure butter. And pure praline. Ah well - too late to put it back. He could always cut down on lunch. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known exactly what he was about when he came in.

‘Had a look at that address yet, chief?’ Barnaby unfolded the tight little square and passed it over. Troy read out, ‘Thirty-two Cavendish Buildings, South West One. That’s Victoria, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Probably a mansion block.’

‘So if he lived there in 1982, and moved to Midsomer Worthy in 1983, when did he live in Kent?’

‘Search me.’

‘At least we know that Grace died before February 1982.’

‘Not necessarily. People have made wills before now cutting out their nearest and dearest. Quick—’ Barnaby picked up the cakestand. ‘Those two women are moving. Put this on their table.’

‘But what if we want—’

‘We won’t’.

‘I might.’

‘Just do as you’re told.’

Grinning, Troy removed the cakestand and returned to find Barnaby chasing a final crumb around his plate with a broad finger and muttering to himself.

‘What was that, sir?’

‘I was thinking about the money. It’s a hell of a lot. When you add on the house - what would that be worth? One fifty?’

‘Minimum. Tray posh out there. And only half an hour from the West End.’

‘So we’re talking about nearly a million pounds.’ Barnaby found it rather touching that a man who longed to write and couldn’t and, if the paintings in his sitting room were anything to go by, had absolutely no appreciation of art, should leave his money in such a generous manner.

‘We are. Lucky devil. Well,’ added the sergeant, for he was a fair man, ‘up to a point’.

‘Hadleigh was obviously much higher in the Civil Service than we pictured him.’

‘Not necessarily. Could’ve been lucky with investments. If you’re prepared to take a few risks you can really divvy up.’ Troy spoke with the authority of a British Gas and Telecom shareholder.

At this point their waitress came back.

‘More coffee, gentlemen?’

‘No,’ replied Barnaby, quickly. ‘Thank you.’ He described what they had eaten and she hauled up a little pad dangling from a string tied around her belt.

‘That’s one biscuit du beurre de praline plus,’ smiling at Troy, ‘a deux jeunes filles sur la bateau.’

‘What’s that then when it’s at home?’ asked the sergeant, smiling broadly.

‘Two young girls on a raft.’

‘My lucky day then.’

‘Seven pounds twenty.’ She tore off a slip and the chief inspector reached for his wallet. ‘Pay at the till please.’

She cleared the table, stacked everything on a tray, lifted it as if it weighed no more than a feather and swanned off. Barnaby watched her go. She had lovely hair, a long shining fall almost to her waist. He thought of Cully, wondered how she was faring and if it would enter her mind to send a postcard before the tour ended. Probably not.

He reached out to pick up the bill, which his sergeant was regarding with some incredulity.

‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’

‘We could have had double sausage, egg and chips, double Bakewell, soup and tea in the canteen for this.’

‘Ah,’ said Barnaby, getting into his coat. ‘But could you have had it in French?’

They queued up at the till, an elaborate, highly wrought metal contraption that went ping! when the total jumped up in old-fashioned, strictly non-digital style. Troy was still looking deeply disconcerted.

‘It’s on the house, Gavin.’

‘Very nice of you, chief.’

‘Not at all. I shall use our eight quid drinks allowance.’

‘From now on,’ said little Bor, ‘I want all my friends to call me “Rebel”.’

‘You ain’t got no friends.’

‘Yes I have.’ Though Boreham sounded certain his expression was somewhat confused. ‘I just don’t know who they are yet.’

‘You’re thick as a nun’s whatsit,’ said Denzil.

At the moment of speaking he seemed to be the holder of Brian’s perpetually usurped authority. The group was hot-seating the notion of power versus popularity and, unsurprisingly, popularity came nowhere.

‘What you have to do,’ Collar said, illustrating their number-one choice, ‘is get your retaliation in first.’

‘Speed plus surprise and no holes barred,’ said Tom, making a swift karate chop. ‘But especially speed.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Denzil. ‘Never fuck anybody over tomorrow you can fuck over today.’

‘Then,’ said Edie, tossing back her wild mane of tangerine hair, ‘you got respect.’

Brian shivered and felt deliciously afraid at the thought of all that proximate, barbarian energy on the loose - swift and irrational, roaring round the precinct of a Saturday night smashing bottles, spraying cars, sinking its steel-capped boots into soft, unprotected flesh. And all the while he was lying, snug and safe, tucked up in the warm at home.

‘Hating people,’ Denzil was saying, with the smile that never reached his mouth, ‘is good for you. Gives you a purpose in life.’

‘Yeah,’ said Collar. ‘I could hate for centuries, me.’

Brian knew that, in his role as teacher, he had an ethical imperative to protest against these attitudes of destructive amorality, to offer a little homily along uplifting lines. You only hurt yourselves by this attitude. (Patently untrue.) What would happen if we did just as we liked? (It’d be a damn sight more interesting world, that’s what.) He said nothing.

‘Wonder what it’s like to kill somebody.’

‘I been near that. Very near.’

‘And me.’ Little Bor dodged a swipe from the back of Denzil’s hand.

‘My dad’s brother did a job on a bookie that wouldn’t pay out. He’s inside now. Detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure. Dead good that is.’ Collar explained why it was dead good.

‘You’re talking absolute nonsense.’ Finally, Brian was moved to protest. ‘You don’t even get to meet the Queen. Now - we absolutely must get on. There’s less than ten minutes left.’

‘They got anywhere with your murder, Brian?’ asked Edie.

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Did they ask you what you were doing while it was happening? For an alibi, like.’

‘They asked all of us.’

‘Imagine being next door.’

‘Did you hear him screaming?’

‘No!’

Brian, pale with queasy imaginings, struggled to retrieve the conversational reins. He almost threatened to walk out, then remembered that the last time he had done so it was they who had vanished, almost before he had finished speaking. It took him three weeks to coax them back.

‘What were you doing, then?’

Brian stared at Edie. In spite of the jumps in conversation he knew exactly what she meant. He frowned as if he genuinely could not remember. As if it was not branded on his heart. ‘Marking papers. Fast asleep. One or the other.’

‘Hope you can prove it,’ said Denzil.

‘His wife’d back him up. Wouldn’t she?’

‘They’d back each other up.’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Tom, wetting his finger and smoothing down the silky hairs on his forearm, ‘if they weren’t in it together.’

‘Why d’you do it, Bri?’ asked Denzil. ‘Money?’

‘Love,’ said Edie, and she hugged her knees and smiled and pouted. ‘I bet he did it for love.’

‘Yeah. Having it off were they - this bloke and your missus?’

‘All right. A joke’s a joke.’ When she smiled, even unkindly, the angels sang. Brian indicated the gymnasium clock. ‘As you can see, our time is up yet again. We don’t meet Friday so that gives you three whole days to study your parts.’

Sniggers all round. They left in a bunch, but the swing doors had hardly closed before Edie re-entered. She was looking cast down and apprehensive. He couldn’t remember seeing her completely on her own before. She appeared smaller and was standing in a slightly knockkneed way, her heavy boots pointing inwards.

‘Brian - I’m dead worried.’

‘And why is that, Edie?’ His heart thundered in his breast. How incredibly sweet she looked. And so vulnerable - like a naughty little girl.

‘Can I talk to you?’

‘That’s what I’m here for.’

‘I’m in terrible trouble, Brian. You simply gotta help me. I don’t know what to do.’

Sue stood, her hand resting on the garden gate, looking anxiously at Rex’s house. All the curtains were drawn. Those on the left caused her special concern, for she knew it would take the four horsemen themselves to stop Rex working on his magnum opus at eleven a.m. and it was now nearly one. No smoke curled from the chimney and yesterday’s milk, together with today’s, was on the front step. The cream emerged from the bottles in two frozen columns topped with caps of red and silver foil.

This alone would have given a concerned neighbour pause for thought, but Rex was unlucky in this respect, being placed between a holiday home and a pair of young go-getters. They worked all hours in the city and all the weekend exuberantly entertained other young go-getters, also at all hours. They had hardly spoken to Rex since the day they moved in.

She pushed open the iron gate and walked up the path, her clogs making quite a clatter. Normally any footsteps brought an immediate response from Montcalm, but today there was only silence. She tapped the brass-cannon door knocker gently and waited.

After a couple of minutes, hesitating to knock again she made her way round to the back of the house. Rex’s garden - two narrow strips of raggedy grass, some ancient roses that had long since reverted to briar and a few fruit bushes in a broken cage - was marked in several places by Montcalm’s recent passing. She remembered again that she had not seen the dog and his master loping around the Green for two - no, three days. Her breath quickened in agitation.

She lifted the latch and stepped into the kitchen, where she was met by a powerful smell of distinctly gone-off meat. Enough light came through the thickly grimed window panes to see that there were several bowls and plates scattered around the rather sticky lino. Lots of milk bottles stood by the sink, which was full of dirty dishes. The bottles were dirty too. One of them was still half-full and had a pale, greenish-grey shape curled up inside, like a small humunculus. The draining board was invisible beneath a mountain of empty dog-food tins. As Sue advanced something scuttled out of a corner and vanished behind the stove.

She called out, ‘Hello-o-o!’

Montcalm appeared at the end of the hall. Sue braced her legs and shoulders, for she had long been familiar with his customary greeting and had no wish to find herself flat on her back on the tacky floor. But the dog seemed not at all to be picking up speed. He trotted rather, in a measured way, his claws ticking lightly on the linoleum.

He entered the kitchen and stood, frowning most urgently up at her. Then he turned and retraced his steps, pausing once to look over his shoulder to see that she was following.

There was even less light in the War Room, just a lemony strip of sunshine where the curtains did not quite join. As Sue walked further in she became aware of bumps under her feet. She bent down and picked up a cardboard tube. There seemed to be several of them, together with some empty transparent bags and torn pieces of shiny paper.

She had only been in the room a few times and couldn’t remember where the switch was. Groping around she knocked a dish of medals off a shelf. There was a cry, roughly querulous, practically in her ear. Sue jumped, crying out in her turn.

She saw then a shrouded shape, huddled in a wing chair, facing the empty grate. Two shapes actually, for Montcalm was now crouching there too.

‘Rex?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s Sue.’

‘Go away. Go away.’

As Sue moved closer she became aware of a most unpleasant closeness, as if all the air had been sucked from the place, leaving it dense and foetid, like a stopped-up lair.

There was an old army lamp of metal and wood with a canvas shade. She switched it on and Rex’s never-ending limbs gave a violent jerk as if receiving an electric shock. Turning away his head he burrowed further into the chair. Even so part of his face remained visible and a sorry sight it was. Every fall and fold of the papery skin was enseamed with dirt and shone with a combination of tears and mucous. The jaw and dependent wattles were covered with white stubble.

Rex’s hair, that shining snowy floss that wafted in the air when he walked as if enjoying a lively and separate existence of its own, was plastered against his skull and glued, in flat, darkened patches, to his neck. Sue could not believe the appalling change in him. She said again, ‘Rex?’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘Go away.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly.’ Worry made Sue speak more sharply than she intended. She added, gently, ‘How can I possibly go away and leave you in this state?’

She knelt and laid her hand tentatively on his knee, felt that this was perhaps a bit forward, got up again and, leaning awkwardly half across the chair, attempted to put an arm around his shoulder. It could have been carved from marble. She felt so frustrated. If he had been a child she could have given him a good cuddle. The dog sniffed, listened, waited.

They stayed like this for several minutes, then Sue’s arm started to ache. She became aware of a dull grating noise. It was Rex, grinding his teeth. After a moment Montcalm began to do the same, shifting his jaw clumsily from side to side as if working over one of his giant bones.

Sue stood up and began to silently lecture herself - a habit she had found helpful at times when feeling threatened or when the world started to behave in a hostile or incomprehensive manner.

Now, come on. You’re a capable person. All right, this is a situation you haven’t come across before but that doesn’t mean you can’t handle it. So - first things first.

There was at least no argument about what that first step should be. Sue retrieved the milk from outside, returned to the kitchen and put the kettle on. This was a large, iron thing which she half filled to do the washing up. A small saucepan would do for tea. She made a lot of noise while doing this. Taps full on, kettle banged down hard on the gas, hoping to discourage whatever had nipped behind the stove on her arrival from nipping out again.

The tea, cheap and rather powdery, was in a tin caddie celebrating the coronation of George VI. The procession covered every side - a golden coach, an open landau, stiff-legged toy soldiers and red-coated horsemen with fire buckets on their heads.

While the tea brewed Sue braced herself to sniff at the various dishes on the floor to see what could stay and what must go into the bin. In the event she decided they should all go and took them out into the back yard together with the empty tins. She could always run down to the shop and get more dog food.

Rex’s few pieces of cutlery were laid out in a neat row on old newspapers. The bone handles were yellow with age and knife blades rattled loosely. Sue selected the least discoloured teaspoon, found a tin mug in the cupboard, sliced off a section of the frozen cream and poured out. She took the mug, a bag of sugar and a saucer next door.

Rex seemed not to have moved. Sue sat down opposite him and said, ‘How many sugars is it?’

When there was no reply she tried to remember from the Writers Group evenings. As she recalled it, quite a lot. She put in three spoonfuls, stirred and held out the mug until the metal handle started to burn her fingers. She put it down in the hearth. She poured a little tea into the saucer and put that down too but, though Montcalm approached and lowered his rough, grey muzzle to the dish, he did not drink.

‘Do have some tea, Rex,’ said Sue. ‘Please.’ Then, suddenly understanding, ‘He won’t drink until you do.’

Rex turned at this and stared directly at her. And, if Sue had been previously distressed at his appearance, she was now even more so. For there was no recognition in his eyes at all. He looked at her quite wildly as if she was a stranger.

Once more she held the mug out, this time putting it into his hands and guiding it to his lips. Saying ‘please’ again, and ‘for Sue’, like she did with her little ones. Rex drank a little and Montcalm immediately started lapping, his huge tongue sloshing the liquid in all directions. It was gone in an instant. Rex got down a couple more swallows then put the tea aside.

Sue asked again if he was ill. There was no response until she added, ‘Would you like me to ring the doctor?’ Rex shook his head violently.

‘But I’ve got to do something.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘And what about Montcalm?’ said Sue.‘He’s not all right.’

Rex started shifting about at this, rocking in his old red-velvet chair, slipping backwards and forwards, his arms locked across his chest.

‘You know he hasn’t eaten any of the food you put down.’

Rex shouted then, the dull vacancy in his eyes banished by a flare of wretched comprehension. He started to struggle to his feet, hanging on to the mantelpiece. But once up he pitched forward and would have fallen had not Sue taken his weight. Although his frame was fragile there was a lot of it and she staggered as she tried, with one arm around his waist and the other across his chest, to persuade him back into the chair.

In the kitchen the big iron kettle boiled over. Sue could hear the lid dancing and clattering, water hissing everywhere. Probably putting the gas out.

‘Oh God ... Rex ... please sit down ...’ She lugged him another step backwards towards the seat. ‘Please? Sit ... down ...’

Montcalm sat. Rex wrenched himself free, moved in the direction of the door and tumbled, saving himself by grabbing at the edge of the games table. Sue left him hanging there and ran into the kitchen.

She found a cloth, so stiff with dirt it was practically standing on edge, and mopped around in front of the stove. She wrung the water out in the filthy sink and thought: I can’t cope with this. No matter how firmly I talk to myself. I just can’t. As soon as I get home I shall ring the Social Services.

A figure materialised in the doorway, leaning on the architrave. Sue caught her breath. Distracted by anxiety she had not heard him shuffling down the hall, nor the accompanying click of Montcalm’s claws.

‘Sue. So sorry. Be a bother.’

‘Ohhh ...’ She ran across to him. ‘Don’t say that, Rex. You’re not a bother. I’m just at a loss to know what to do.’

‘You’re very kind.’

‘No I’m not,’ protested Sue and believed it, as genuinely kind people often do.

They looked at each other and Sue felt a great wash of relief for Rex’s eyes, though filled with painful tears, were lucid and intelligent. He made his way, almost unaided, to the table and sat down looking round.

‘His food? The dishes?’

‘They’re in the sink.’

She poured what was left of the hot water over them and looked in vain for some washing-up liquid. She discovered a tiny wire-mesh basket attached to a long handle and containing scraps of soap and whisked this vigorously around the bowl, drumming up a few bubbles.

‘I threw the meat away. It was starting to smell. Don’t worry if you’ve run out. I can easily get more.’

‘That’s all right. There’s some in the cupboard.’

She washed up quickly, constantly looking over her shoulder and smiling, anxious not to break the contact between them. Then she mopped things dry with a near-transparent tea towel. She found the dog food, plus a single tin of winter-vegetable soup, rather rusty and with a faded label. She heated this in the saucepan she had used to make the tea. All this while she kept up a murmurous stream of chatter, seemingly to herself but loud enough for Rex to hear. Now and then, to reinforce the link, she would ask a question, appearing unconcerned as to whether or not he responded.

When the soup was warm she looked around in vain for a non-canine bowl. In the end she poured it into a Pyrex casserole, placing this, together with a spoon, on the table.

Rex said, ‘I feel very strange.’

‘I should think you do. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten for days.’

‘No.’ Rex avoided looking at Montcalm. Just spooned some of the soup into his mouth.

Immediately the dog barked, a deep, rumbling woof, and lolloped across to where Sue was forking out some meat. He rose on his back legs, easily reaching the draining board, where he rested his huge paws and waited, slobbering with excitement, as she topped up the pile with some biscuits. She put the dish on the floor. A blink and it had vanished. This procedure was repeated twice more.

A lead was hanging over the banisters in the hall and Sue picked it up. Almost knocked flat by a delirious dog who had seen immediately which way the wind was blowing, she struggled to hook the lead to his collar.

‘I’m going to take him for a run now.’ Even as she spoke she guessed that the ordering of her pronouns might prove to be extremely optimistic.

‘Yes, oh yes,’ cried Rex. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much, Sue.’

‘Try and finish your soup,’ said Sue. Wrapping the lead several times around her wrist she opened the kitchen door. As she turned to leave she added, ‘And when I get back we must talk.’

Amy was draping greyish sheets over an old clothes-horse in the outhouse. She had just fed them through the rubber mangle, which had got a lot of the water out but by no means all. Even on lovely summer days she was not allowed to hang the washing in the garden. Honoria said it was common.

Amy straightened the second sheet, smoothing out as many wrinkles as she could, for they were very old, a linen/cotton mixture, and absolute hell to iron. Then she carried the old wicker basket back into the kitchen and started to think about food, for it was nearly one fifteen. There was an unopened tin of luncheon meat and, in the fridge, some cooked cauliflower and a heel of hard cheddar. She took down a packet of rice and thought about a risotto. The watery Marmite plus an Oxo cube would do for stock. If she could just find an onion ... God, it was all so depressing.

It was strange how, if you were warm and happy, the smallest amount of the plainest food satisfied. She and Ralph had sat together on the sun-baked steps of their tiny house in the Spanish mountains and eaten bread and olives and drunk rough red wine and it had been enough.

Sometimes Amy could still feel his arm around her waist. The weight of it; the way his wrist rested on her hip, the light pressure from the palm of his hand. And she remembered how round and firm his shoulder had felt when she rested her head there. And how sweet the line of his neck before the flesh had fallen away from his poor bones.

She found an onion in a twist of old newspaper. A bit on the soft side and sprouting green, shiny shoots, but it would have to do. Amy took out the chopping board and got down to it. The juice made her cry. At least, if her sister-in-law came in, she would have a good excuse.

Honoria hated blubbing. Hated any sort of weakness. In the terrible final days of Ralph’s life, when anguish and despair had affected Amy to such a degree that she had become temporarily deranged and had had to be sedated, Honoria had not faltered. Day and night she had sat with her dying brother, pointlessly spooning sustenance into his mouth, closing her eyes when he slept and waking, as if by magic, the moment his opened.

It was Honoria who had talked to the doctors, arranged for the body to be transported, organised the funeral, chosen the stone. Amy simply stumbled after in a druggy, pain-filled haze. If she had not been so totally incapable she surely would not have ended up at Gresham House. Perhaps it was then, thought Amy, scraping the onion into a saucepan, that Honoria had begun to truly despise her. Not that Honoria ever evinced the slightest surprise at the lack of backbone and moral fibre displayed by her brother’s wife. It was, she silently implied, no more than one would expect from a person of inferior pedigree, for the only true nobility was the nobility of the blood. When Amy had first been introduced Honoria had behaved like an Edwardian duchess whose son had got secretly engaged to a base-born Gaiety girl.

Apparently (or so Ralph had said) their father had been even worse - a great admirer, like more than one upper-class Englishman in the thirties, of Adolf Hitler and his pursuit of racial purity. Before she had properly understood the strength and virulence of Honoria’s ruling passion, Amy had foolishly taken issue when the idea of marriage between different races was being vilified, had spoken of melting pots and world harmony and how, whatever our colour and creed, we were all human beings.

Honoria had explained at length, with cold patience, that such an attitude was not only sentimental and ill-informed but completely against the will of God. Eagles and ostriches and sparrows were all birds, but you never saw them being so foolish and ill-disciplined as to try and mate with each other. Nature had organised matters to perfection so that each feather, eye, beak and claw was repeated to perfection ad infinitum. Only man thought he could improve on this flawless system. After all this it was a mere hop, skip and a jump to how efficient Nature was at disposing of the weak, lame, halt and those who had somehow not managed to repeat themselves to perfection. At this point Amy had switched off.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Oh!’ She almost dropped the pan. ‘You made me jump.’ Aware that she sounded nervous and uncertain, Amy then became resentful. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

Honoria stood in the doorway. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that she occupied the doorway. She stared at Amy with unbroken concentration, then repeated herself.

‘Lunch.’ Amy hated being stared at. ‘I’m making lunch.’ She seized a wooden spoon and started agitating the slivers of onion. ‘Won’t be long.’

‘It’s quarter past already,’ said Honoria.‘You’re late.’

Amy never knew why it was that moment she chose to rebel. Afterwards it seemed rather that the moment had chosen her. That all the months of skivvydom and endless, niggling humiliations coalesced into a thrust of aggravation so powerful that her jaws opened of their own accord and the words just tumbled out.

‘I’m late, Honoria, because I’ve done the washing. This took a long time as there is no machine. Before I did the washing I cleaned the bedrooms. In between those tasks, if you recall, I was verifying certain facts on your index cards and taking letters to the post. The miracle to me, Honoria, is not that lunch is late but that I’ve breath to spare to get any lunch at all.’

During this speech Amy did not look at her sister-in-law. And when she had finished she forced herself not to pick up the wooden spoon or relight the gas or make any move along the lines of domestic servitude. The room had gone immensely quiet. Into this vacuum, now that she had said her say, Amy’s apprehension started to seep.

And yet, what could Honoria actually do? Throw me out, decided Amy, that’s what. But would that be so terrible? Surely she could not be any worse off. There were always people wanting help. She had come across a genteel magazine in the library full of advertisements. Any one of them must surely reveal someone kinder than Honoria, with a warmer home and a more generous purse.

What was it Ralph had said when his illness had first been diagnosed and they had clung to each other’s hands in disbelieving terror? Courage, mon brave. Surely facing an unknown future must be a trifle in comparison. As these thoughts raced through Amy’s mind the glimpse of freedom they engendered was so exhilarating that she felt almost elated.

Blinking her way back to the present she became aware that Honoria was speaking and picked up the words ‘... weren’t so slow ...’

‘If I am slow,’ Amy said sharply, ‘it is because I am cold. My fingers are frozen stiff half the time.’ She turned back to the sink and tossed the wooden spoon in with a clatter. ‘I can’t stay here any longer.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’d’ve thought that quite plain, Honoria.’ Amy’s stomach churned. She was beginning to feel sick. ‘I want to - I’m going to - leave.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’ In spite of the chill Amy’s hair was damp with perspiration. Struggling to brace herself against the tyranny of the past, she slowly looked up.

Honoria appeared stunned. Her stony grey eyes, in which Amy could not recall ever having seen a single flash of emotion, shone with what seemed very much like panic.

‘You must stay here. Where I can ...’

Honoria running out of verbal steam? Another first. Amy, cautiously testing the temperature of this unfamiliar atmosphere, said, ‘Where you can work me half to death for nothing.’

‘No, no,’ replied Honoria quickly. ‘Where I can ... keep an eye on you. I promised Ralph I would.’

There was such an improvisational air about the last few words that Amy felt sure they were false. And yet what was more natural than that Ralph would have commended his poverty-stricken wife into the care of his only living relative? Amy tried to believe it, wanted to believe it. But wanting, she discovered, was not enough.

‘I hope you will reconsider,’ said Honoria. Her mouth went into some sort of strange spasm. It was as if it held a square obstacle that was trying to force its way past the tight round O of her thin lips. Eventually it succeeded. ‘Please.’

Amy was conscious of a great dismay. She had actually screwed her courage to the sticking place. Had seen the door that led to freedom standing ajar. Must it now be slammed forever in her face?

‘I’ve been thoughtless.’ Honoria compounded her mysterious felony. ‘So used to the cold I don’t notice. We must light a fire. And I’ll sort out that boiler. Order some coke and really get it going.’

She was moving away as if the matter was settled. Amy couldn’t bear it. She wanted to stop her. To cry out that the boiler didn’t matter nor the lighting of fires. That it was all too late and her mind was made up. Tomorrow she would be packing and by the next day, gone.

But even as she called, ‘Honoria?’ the library door closed and she was once more alone.

Barnaby sat behind his desk, rumbling. Mindful of his starter at Bunter’s he had consumed only a ham salad in the canteen at lunchtime, cutting the pink and white meat, already paper thin, into even smaller portions and carving up the tomatoes - finding himself in the ridiculous position of eating something he didn’t really want while at the same time trying to make it last.

Troy, sitting opposite, had lowered cottage pie, peas, double chips, apricot crumble, two Kit Kats and a huge beaker of Coke which must have given the two young girls on a boat some stick.

‘I don’t know where you put it all. You must have hollow legs.’

Troy regarded the extremely large figure facing him with some sympathy. It was all that cooking that had started it. The sergeant had been quite perturbed when he first discovered the governor’s new hobby, for it had struck him as more than a touch on the bendy side. But then he discovered, via a new sitcom, that all the world’s greatest chefs were men, which not only figured but went a considerable way towards allaying his suspicions. For it stood to reason they couldn’t all be poofters.

Now he watched as Barnaby got up and started prowling around, staring at screens over their operatives’ shoulders, snatching up any phone within an arm’s length the second it rang, chatting to the statements reader, interrogating researchers. Keeping busy not just because that was his nature but because he hoped, by so doing, to banish from his mind the image of the calorifically engorged automat squatting a mere few yards away.

‘Water’s very good,’ said Troy.

‘What?’

‘Maureen drinks a lot of water. When she’s trying to lose weight.’

‘Just mind your own bloody business - all right?’

Barnaby turned and walked back to his patch and Troy, quite unoffended, followed. He perched on the edge of the desk and said, ‘I’ve had a thought.’

‘Well treat it gently. It’s in a strange place.’

‘About this visit of Max Jennings. I was wondering if it wasn’t a coincidence that his name came up at that writers’ meeting. We know now about Laura Hutton’s feelings. What if - even before she knew he wasn’t Mr Spotless - she was getting cheesed off at being rejected. And invited Jennings out of spite.’

‘That presupposes she knew the man. Or at least was aware of the effect his visit might have on Hadleigh.’

‘Stranger things have happened. You’ve said yourself, if we put all the coincidences we come across in a book no one’d ever believe it.’

‘True.’

‘Like for instance the whole lot of them being writers.’

‘Not entirely, Laura Hutton was just faking it to make sure she saw him once a month.’

‘Seems to me they’re all faking it. Nobody seems to have sold anything.’

‘I suppose we ought to be grateful they’re not writing detective fiction. Remember Lucy Bellringer?’

‘Who?’

‘That old woman at Badger’s Drift whose friend was murdered.’

‘God, yes.’ Troy laughed. ‘Totally looped she was.’

‘What is it, Owen?’ This was addressed to a uniformed constable coming up to the desk.

‘I’m afraid we’ve had a negative result for 1979 on the trace for Hadleigh’s marriage, sir.’ He paused, then, noting Barnaby’s dismay, said, ‘Do you want us to try 1978 or 1980?’

‘Not at the moment.’

Dismissed, the man returned to his machine. Barnaby sat back and closed his eyes. Troy watched in silence, thinking how tired his boss looked. His eyelids were droopy and wizened, and the skin on his face looked stiff and pale. Eventually the sergeant said, ‘I shouldn’t be too cast down, chief. After all we didn’t know for certain it was ’79. Just worked it out from what Hadleigh put about. Why don’t you give the year before a whirl?’

‘We’re not wasting more time and money following up what I’m beginning to suspect is a load of false information. We already know he was far from being the heartbroken celibate he pretended. And that when he was supposed to have a place in Kent he was actually shacked up in Victoria.’ Barnaby got up and turned to face the map on the wall behind him. A blown-up aerial plan of Midsomer Worthy.

‘I’m afraid all the people we’re currently interviewing only know what Hadleigh wanted them to know. To find out anything really useful we need to talk to someone from the past.’

Barnaby rested the tip of his index finger on the headed pins marking Plover’s Rest and thought of the visiting celebrity roaring away, to use Mrs Clapton’s term, on the night of the murder. Where was he now?

Although there had been no official call put out, the author’s newsworthy presence on the fatal evening had been well reported. It struck the chief inspector as highly unlikely that Jennings had neither seen these reports nor had them drawn to his attention.

In which case, why had he not got in touch? The answer ‘because he was guilty’ was obvious enough. Yet there was also a deeply disturbing alternative. Might it not be the case that Jennings had not come forward because he was unable to do so? In other words were they all looking, not for a prime suspect, but for a second victim?

Sue sat, biting her nails, in the cramped untidy sitting room whose glowing terracotta walls still vibrated from the violent slamming of the front door. She was left alone, consumed with a need to talk to someone, anyone, anyone at all, about her visit to Rex’s house and their subsequent extraordinary conversation.

She had made innumerable attempts to tell Brian, but he had been behaving so oddly from the moment he arrived home that eventually, out of sheer exasperation, she had given up.

Shouting, ‘Ah, tea - tea!’ he had dashed to sit down, only to push and pull his food vigorously about without eating it. He kept looking at the clock and flicking the end of the table with his nails.

After eating he cleaned his teeth then, half an hour later, Sue heard him scrubbing at them again, swilling and spitting in seemingly endless repetition. He emerged blowing into his cupped hands and inhaling with a deeply suspicious frown.

He disappeared upstairs and she heard drawers open and close and the forceful clack and rattle of manipulated coat hangers. Coming down, he vanished once more into the bathroom, carrying a pile of shirts over his arm. This time his reappearance was marked by soaking wet hair hanging in a skinny plait and a complexion rosy from friction. Then, after checking the clock yet again, he sat down on the sofa with his bulldog-clipped sheets and began to peruse his play.

All this time Sue had been hovering around submitting conversational openings along ‘you’ll never guess ... the most amazing thing ...’ lines that she herself would have found instantly irresistible.

Brian behaved as if she wasn’t there apart from once, at the moment of his departure, when, reaching for his scarf, he moved her, none too carefully, out of the way.

When she asked what all this hustle and bustle was in aid of he had said brusquely, ‘I’ve had to call an extra rehearsal. We’ve barely a fortnight to go.’

Time was when Sue would have extracted comfort from such a statement. Seized upon it as an excuse for her husband’s boorish behaviour. It’s not his fault. He’s tired, worried, under pressure. Now she not only scorned these false consolations but was even beginning to recognise, in this process of rejection, a certain flinty satisfaction. It would not have occurred to her to define this growing awareness as the beginnings of self-respect. But that was what it was.

After Brian had left Sue made a quick call to his parents to say goodnight to her daughter, who was staying over. Mandy did this quite frequently, sleeping an exhausted sleep in her constantly redecorated room after staying up as long as she liked, watching whatever she liked on the box.

Mrs Clapton greeted Sue frigidly and called Amanda to the phone. There was a certain amount of wrangling to get her to do so. Mrs Clapton, who had not covered the mouthpiece as people usually do on such occasions, said happily:

‘We’re being a naughty girl, mummy, I’m afraid. A very naughty girl indeed. But we’re not going to be allowed to get away with it.’

The receiver was laid on its side and Mrs Clapton’s sensible Cuban heels stomped off. Sue heard the sound of jovial conversation and Amanda laughing. Now the heels were stomping, triumphantly unaccompanied, on their way back. Before Mrs Clapton had a chance to speak Sue hung up.

Unable to settle she wandered around tidying up after Brian. Clothes were strewn all over the bedroom floor and there was a jumble of sweaters on the bed. She untangled them and folded each one quickly in a beautifully precise way. She had had a weekend job in a haberdasher’s when she was fifteen and had never lost the knack.

Downstairs she mopped up the bathroom, which reeked of Brian’s Christmas cologne and aftershave, and flung three sopping towels in the washing machine. Then she swished the clippings from his beard down the plughole and cleaned the toothpaste-streaked spittle from the basin. A rub over the tiles and glass shelf, which were also liberally spattered with water, a quick squirt from the Toilet Duck, and Sue was back in the kitchen looking vaguely round for something else to do.

This was totally unlike her. Usually, whenever she had the house to herself, she whipped out her paints and portfolio and got to grips with Hector, but tonight she knew she would not be able to concentrate. The events of the day crowded her mind to the exclusion of all else.

It was at times like this that she missed Amy most, for there was no one else in the village whom she could really call a friend. True, she knew all the play-group mums fairly well but these relationships were purely of a domestic nature. There was not one that she could contact to discuss what was now weighing so heavily on her mind. They would think it most odd.

Momentarily Sue was tempted to ring up Amy anyway, on some pretext or other, and just pour it out. But that would be very unfair. She had done this once or twice just after they first met, but Honoria had either interrupted, demanding that Amy find or fetch something or other ‘at once’, or been coldly critical at great length when Sue had hung up.

But, sooner or later, the opportunity would arise and, to have her thoughts in order for when it did, Sue closed her eyes and went over the events of the afternoon, starting from the moment when she had gone flying back through Rex’s door on the end of Montcalm’s lead.

She found Rex in the kitchen, slumped wretchedly in exactly the same position as when she left. To her great distress, as she approached she realised he had been weeping. The thin, fragile skin on his face was wet through and looked about to dissolve. Before she had a chance to speak he cried out, ‘I killed him, Sue! It was me. I did it ... I did it ...’

Sue had sat down carefully and calmly. She knew, of course, just what he meant - knew that he was not describing an imaginary confrontation in one of his war games or re-running, in his disturbed fancy, an historically famous fight to the death.

It did not occur to her to be frightened, largely because she was quite sure there had been some barmy mistake. For this was Rex, who carried an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world’s most devastating weapons of destruction in his head and could not bring himself to swat a fly. But that he believed this wild declaration was obvious, for lines of agony were carved deeply across his brow and his eyes brimmed with hot, fresh tears.

‘I don’t understand, Rex,’ said Sue quietly. ‘Please tell me what all this is about.’

He told her, starting with Gerald’s visit and finishing with a description of his own shameful conduct.

Sue listened and found herself, despite the seriousness of the occasion, enthralled. Her imagination fleshed out the narrative. She saw Gerald, red-faced and awkward, perched on the study window-sill and Rex, alight with a willingness to help, waving his hands about in gestures of reassurance. She heard the wind in the dark trees at the death of the day and felt, crawling down her spine, the eyes of an unseen observer.

After a rather garbled conclusion, punitively laced with such phrases as ‘court martial’ and ‘shot at dawn’, there arose a miserable interval during which Rex gazed wretchedly at his shabby tartan slippers.

Sue did not make the mistake of underestimating the depths of his despair. He had been lying in a pit of it for days and would be crouched there still if she had not happened to drop by. She felt the burden of her responsibility and found herself wishing, but only briefly, that she had called in the Social Services after all and handed things over to them.

She turned over various responses in her mind, but each seemed less adequate than the one before. Her normal response to the crises which happened, with exuberant regularity, in the play-group was one of kind, mildly bossy nannyism. Worse than useless here. Inadvertently Sue sighed, exasperated by her own inadequacy, and her heart quickened with the fear of making a mistake, of choosing words so hopelessly inept that instead of effecting a rescue they would push Rex even deeper into the shadows. But speak she must, for it looked as if, any minute now, he was going to start crying again. She said, with great determination, ‘Rex - I am absolutely sure you have got this absolutely wrong.’

The forcefulness of this approach certainly seemed to impress. Rex sat up on the old kitchen chair looking almost alarmed. ‘Wrong?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘Because it’s quite impossible.’ Why was she so sure? Heaven send me a reason. Please. Any reason. Oh - if only Rex didn’t looked so pitifully hopeful. ‘Because ... Because he’s a famous writer.’

‘I don’t see—’

‘Famous writers don’t murder people. They simply don’t.’

‘... Well ...’

‘Name one. Name me one famous murdering writer.’ Sue waited, but not too long. No point in tempting fate. ‘You can’t, can you?’

‘Not off the top of my head,’ admitted Rex.

‘That’s because murderers are always nobodies. That’s why they do them. So they can get in the papers and be somebodies.’

‘But everything that happened. Gerald—’

‘I’m not saying you’ve got that wrong. Where your mistake lies is in the conclusions you’ve drawn.’

‘Oh?’

‘Which you have come to not for logical reasons but because you’re consumed with guilt.’

‘God, I am. Yes. God, yes.’

‘So you’re not thinking straight. For instance, haven’t you asked yourself why someone should be in the woods at that hour of the night, in such appalling weather, watching Gerald’s house?’

‘You mean ... that person could have been the murderer?’

‘I’m convinced of it. And what’s more (out of sight Sue crossed her fingers tightly) the police are too. In fact only yesterday they were back there. Testing for footprints and ... um ... measuring. If you hadn’t been shut away here being so silly you’d have seen them.’

She hoped this wasn’t too bracing. Rex was looking infinitesimally less crumbly but still far from convinced, as his next words underlined.

‘But there’s no escaping the fact that Gerald was afraid to be left alone with Jennings.’

‘I’ve some ideas on that situation as well,’ said Sue, thinking on her toes and lying in her teeth. ‘I’ve been wondering if we haven’t been in danger of taking Gerald’s words too literally.’

‘I don’t quite understand.’

‘Not wanting to be left alone with someone doesn’t necessarily mean physical fear of that person. Gerald could have wanted to avoid Max’s company for all sorts of reasons.’

‘Such as?’

He was beginning to sound genuinely interested. Sue cast frantically around for sensible-sounding reasons whilst her face remained calm behind a smile of quiet optimism. Finally one of the more florid convolutions in Rompers came to her rescue.

‘I would like to suggest,’ she began, with a trace of the swagger that lawyers assume preparatory to hooking their thumbs in their waistcoats and uttering the words ‘your honour’, ‘an intelligence connection. I think we should be asking ourselves why Gerald was so secretive about his past.’

‘But he wasn’t—’

‘Pardon me, Rex,’ (objection overruled) ‘but he most certainly was. How on earth do you think a low-grade clerk in the Ministry of Agriculture could retire in his early forties, buy a house like Plover’s Rest and an expensive car and live, apparently in comfort, without ever doing a stroke of work again?’

‘Good heavens!’ Rex stared hard at Sue, his mouth hanging slightly open. ‘He couldn’t possibly.’

‘I put it to you that the section of the Civil Service that Gerald worked for was not Agriculture but MI5. And that Max was either a fellow conspirator or, more likely, Gerald’s control. They went through hell together - maybe saved each other’s lives - but eventually Gerald just couldn’t take any more. He became a burnt-out case. No further use to the government. So they cast him aside.’

‘What absolute bastards.’

‘It’s the name of the game, Rex.’

‘Poor devil!’

‘Forever after he felt the disgrace of it.’

‘He would, of course.’

‘Naturally the last thing he wanted was to have all this painfully revived.’

‘Why didn’t he say? I would have understood. It is my field after all.’

‘They take an oath.’

‘Ah.’

‘So you see—’

‘Hang on. Jennings. Isn’t that an Irish name?’

‘I think he comes from—’

‘By Jiminy!’ And then a softly muttered soldier’s curse. ‘I believe we’re fingering the IRA here.’

‘I shouldn’t jump—’

‘We must ring the police.’ Briefly his attorney rested her head in her hands. ‘The Terrorist Squad. New Scotland Yard.’

Sue spent the next quarter of an hour dissuading Rex from immediate action before she felt it safe to transfer her attention to practical matters. These included bathing his face and hands and talking him into shaving. She made some fresh tea and drew up a short list of things he needed from the shop.

‘I’ll get them in the morning.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m going to switch the immersion on now. Promise me you’ll have a hot bath and a lovely long rest.’

Rex agreed and meant it, for combined exhaustion and unhappiness had left him feeling he could sleep forever.

‘In the morning you can put on some nice clean things and I’ll take these grotty ones for a whizz in my machine. Now.’ She leaned forward and kissed the deep ridges across his white, dry forehead. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?’

Rex just trapped a yawn and Montcalm, who had been sitting at his master’s feet throughout, smiled in the strange way that dogs have, stretching his blackish-grey top lip, wrinkling back his nostrils and slightly opening his mouth.

And it was on that positive note that Sue had left them. Sitting side by side in the dim, squalid little kitchen, not nearly so distraught as when she arrived but still, she feared, capable in an instant of tumbling back into remorseful sorrow.

Now, back in her own front room, Sue stopped biting her nails, sprang up from the sofa and started pacing about. She had to dream up a method of keeping them happy. And also find a way to stop Rex racing all around the village with tales of Republican mayhem.

Oh, it was all too much for one person to handle. She needed to share this new responsibility. Obtain assurance that she had done the right thing. Perhaps get some advice on what her best course of future action should be.

Then, stopping almost in mid-stride, it came to her. There was someone. Not a person with whom she was especially friendly or had anything in common with, but a member of the Circle nevertheless. And, as such, bound to be interested in Rex’s revelations.

Sue sat down again, pulled the phone on to her lap and dialled Laura’s number.

Laura was glad, after all, that she had gone into work. Several nice things had happened and, while before last Monday most would have barely registered, today, cumulatively, they had almost cheered her up. She had decided to treat these incidents as omens; small signposts indicating possible ways out of the morass of misery in which she was so helplessly floundering.

First, there were two cheques in the post. One, for over three thousand pounds, from a couple who had ignored all her previous letters and invoices and proved persistently evasive on the telephone. Laura had been finally compelled to threaten them with a summons.

Then Adrian McLaren, the man who had brought the linen cupboard over in his Land Rover, had asked her out for a drink. She had said no, naturally, but had recognised, even at the moment of refusal, a faint but surely healthy glimmer of satisfaction.

But best of all had been lunch. Laura had always had a friendly relationship with the owners of the Blackbird bookshop. They occasionally took in each other’s parcels and kept an eye generally if one or the other was absent. Every now and again Avery Phillips would ask Laura round for what he called ‘soup and bits’ and she always went, for he was a wonderful cook.

Today she had said she really didn’t feel up to it which was true, for by one o’clock the nearly imperceptible buzz given by the drinks invitation had worn off and she was feeling utterly dreary again. But Avery had insisted and she had had neither the will nor the energy to argue.

It was not as if, she told herself climbing the steep unvarnished stairs, she would have to make conversation. Avery always talked a blue streak, never waiting for a response or listening if one came.

The somewhat dusty room over the shop was mainly used for storage, over half the space being taken up by boxes and brown-paper parcels of books. Obsolete posters urgently hyping past bestsellers were stuck to the walls. One corner held a small sink and a Baby Belling. In the window bay a small, round table was beautifully laid for three. Stiff white cloth and napkins, plain but elegant wine glasses, bistro cutlery. A bottle of wine, Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon, was uncorked and breathing.

Tim Young, Avery’s partner, pulled out a chair for Laura and Avery served, on basic white china, thick curried parsnip soup with nan bread, tiny filo parcels of melting goat’s cheese and slices of raw, marinaded fennel. He poured the wine, and its fragrance mingled divinely with the spicy food.

Laura lifted a soup spoon to her lips, then put it down again. Directly facing her was a spectacularly gruesome poster. A yawning grave surrounded by rotting maggoty skulls was giving up its ghost in the form of a massive scaly creature with two heads, each of which held a huge molten eye. Inside these spitting furnaces many tiny creatures were being burnt to a frazzle.

‘I’m afraid ...’ Laura averted her head and made a repulsed movement with her hand. Avery looked over his shoulder and immediately got up.

‘My dear, I’m so sorry.’ He bustled round to her side of the table and changed seats, grumbling to Tim as he sat down. ‘What were you thinking of?’

‘What I’m always thinking of,’ replied Tim. ‘My wild nights with Simon Callow.’

‘Take no notice,’ said Avery, resettling himself. ‘He’s never even met Simon Callow. I shall take that dreadful thing down after lunch.’

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ protested Tim. ‘I like it. It reminds me of your ex.’

Laura listened to them happily prattling on. At first she ate automatically, distracted by melancholy, but nobody could eat Avery’s food automatically for long. As her nose and taste buds became entranced by the soft but vibrant impact of the wine and the piquant, buttery soup, Laura’s attention was claimed completely.

When she next tuned into the conversation the talk was of VAT returns, the property market and the general bloody-mindedness of bank managers.

‘It’s not even as if it’s their money,’ complained Avery, very loudly.

‘Calm down,’ said Tim.

‘I’m perfectly calm!’

‘You’re shouting.’

‘I’m not shouting. Am I shouting, Laura? I mean, truly, am I?’

Laura, nibbling a fat Greek olive that smelled of coriander, did not reply. Now that the meal was almost over she felt the paralysis of loneliness starting to creep back. Isolated, unintentionally withdrawn, she drained her glass in one quick movement.

‘What is it, love?’ said Tim. ‘What’s the matter?’

She looked across at the lean, dark face intently regarding her. His eyes - unlike his partner’s, which were always inquisitive and glossy with excitement at the merest whiff of another’s sorrows - were grave and concerned. Perhaps it was this that made Laura answer honestly. Perhaps it was the wine.

‘Someone’s died. A friend.’

‘Oh, Laura.’ Tim reached across the table and took her hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘And here we were,’ said Avery, ‘blathering on.’ He refilled her glass. ‘Drink up, heart.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

To her surprise, for she had already talked about it to a degree that had left her quite wrung out, Laura found that she did. That previous outpouring to the chief inspector, such an anguished, angry flux, had left her sore and miserable. The whole process had been so untimely - provoked not by a need on her part to speak but by pressure from an impersonal inquisitor.

‘The man who died - he was killed actually - lived in our village.’

‘Not the one in the papers!’ gasped Avery. There was a sharp movement under the table. He winced and said, ‘Sorry.’

‘Yes. I loved him,’ said Laura simply. And after that it was easy. She started at the very beginning, when she had trodden on Gerald’s foot in the village store, and went on until the end, when she had kissed him goodnight (and, unwittingly, goodbye) on the last night of his life.

‘I always used to think,’ she concluded sadly, ‘that if you loved someone hard enough and for long enough eventually they wouldn’t be able to help loving you back. Very ... very foolish ...’

‘Oh darling, don’t take on.’ Avery produced a large silk Paisley square from his breast pocket and passed it over with a flourish. ‘Have a blotette.’ Laura blew her nose. ‘All due respects, but he must have been blind as a bat. Heavens - if I weren’t gay I’d spend my entire life panting through your letter box. Wouldn’t you, Tim?’

‘Absolutely.’ Tim stood up and rested his hand lightly on Laura’s shoulder. ‘Some coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’ Her head was heavy from the wine. She looked at her watch. ‘Good grief - it’s half past three.’

‘So?’ He plugged in the grinder.

‘You’ll be losing customers.’

‘On a day like this?’ said Avery. Hailstones were bouncing off the window. When the coffee arrived he mused aloud on the possibility of there being any choccies. Tim produced a dish of Godiva Manon Blanc and Avery said, ‘Ooohh - I shouldn’t.’

‘Why ask then, you ninny?’

The conversation reverted to the tragedy. Tim told Laura she knew where they were and if there was anything they could do, anything at all ... Avery said she must come to dinner at the flat very soon, then asked what Max Jennings was really like. Tim spoke again and wondered if she’d thought about moving.

‘Moving? You mean the shop?’

‘No, no. From the village. You seem to have been terribly unhappy there,’ he continued, ‘since you fell for this chap. And if you stay you’ll just be endlessly reminded.’

And that was how Laura came to be sitting on her pretty little turquoise love seat five hours later surrounded by bumf from Causton’s many estate agents, one of whom was coming at ten in the morning to value her house. The speed with which she had accepted Tim’s suggestion left Laura with the feeling that she must have, eventually, come to just such a conclusion by herself.

She felt - not light-hearted, that would be going too far - but as if some sort of corner had been turned. Now that Gerald was no longer present, would never be present again, she would try to love him in a less tormented way. Grieve cleanly, as if for an old friend. And perhaps, eventually, resignation at her loss would transform itself into release.

As Brian approached the rusty railings encircling 13 Quarry Cottages he found a moment, even in the midst of extreme physical and emotional turmoil, to wonder at their nomenclature, for they were not only a mere two in number, but a hell of a stone’s throw from the nearest quarry.

He stood motionless beneath the sugary laden branches of a slender tree, doubly drained of colour by ice and moonlight. Frost nibbled at his vitals. He kept swallowing very fast in a futile attempt to slow down his heart rate and remain calm. He had stood precisely thus many times, including the night of Gerald’s murder, but never before by appointment.

To pass the time he ran through the three scenes he had, after much rewriting, finally completed. They were not entirely satisfactory. Rather like blancmange their outline was tremulous and their content hard to define.

The problem was that Brian, having been compelled to weigh freedom of expression - the ripe invention of his actors’ movement and dialogue - against his own future as a schoolmaster, had come down, quite unequivocally, in favour of the latter. Of course he was well aware that all his cuts could be reinstated ‘on the night’ or even (he fainted at the thought) improved upon. Nothing he could do about that but trust to luck.

It would be all right. Basically, at the end of the day, they were good kids. On his side. Like all ignored, neglected youngsters - and grown-ups too come to that - they only wanted admiration and respect. To be somebody. He understood that, oh yes. With all his heart and soul.

Brian pushed back his cuff and consulted his Kronograff Cosmopolitan. Numerals the colour of phosporescent mushy peas glowed up at him. It showed the time in London, Paris and New York and was water resistant to a hundred metres. Brian rubbed the glass admiringly with the back of his glove and, boldly risking radon poisoning, peered closely at the dial. It was good to know that whatever the occasion, whether strolling down the Boulevard Haussman or snorkelling in the Hudson, should a casual passer-by happen to be in need of the hour they would not ask in vain.

Brian became aware that the tip of his nose was frozen. Without a doubt the shirt he had finally decided on was not warm enough, even under his mother’s hand-knitted Aran cardie. He had decided to abandon his string vest. His baseball cap, through the back slot of which his plait had been pulled, did not really keep the warm in.

Edie had said nine o’clock. One minute to go. Trained up into precise punctuality since babyhood he could not bring himself to knock on the door a second earlier.

When she had come back after rehearsal to ask for help with her script his pleasure had been tempered by a certain sceptism. In fact he had gone so far as to check the corridor, half expecting to discover the rest of them snorting and giggling behind the swing doors. But it had been quite empty. And his suspicions had been completely vanquished when, as they were parting, she had said, ‘Don’t tell the others.’

At this remark an upsetting little thrill had rippled through Brian’s slender frame. Agreeable yet alarming. For the words seemed to him to add a definitely clandestine gloss to Edie’s request. Hoiked it out of the simple teacher/pupil category into something quite different. He had been both relieved and disappointed when she had added,‘They’d only laugh.’

Even so the fact remained that he would, presumably, be alone with her and since their brief exchange his imagination had run lubriciously riot. In vain did he argue that the aim of the visit was basically pastoral. Inventive and spicy images still seethed.

She sat, hands on her wide-apart knees, revealing those absurdly brief, terribly tight, furry knickers. What Tom called her pom-pom shorts. Alternatively, Brian zoomed in on her ears. One a transparent spiralling unblemished shell of exquisite delicacy, the other brutally hammered by bronze and iron-like shapes - studs and pins and rings and dependent, trembling corkscrews of silver wire. He pulled a comb from her hair and it tumbled, like glowing lava, over bare shoulders.

An owl hooted. He glanced again at his wrist. Half a minute past! Thirty whole, deeply precious seconds wasted. He looked for a gate, could not find one and climbed over the railings.

By the light of a brand-new carriage lamp he could see a scrubby bit of grass littered with domestic detritus. A rusty fridge, part of a sideboard, some smashed-up tea chests and a disembowelled armchair piled with old car tyres. Next to the chair was a beer barrel lying on its side.

As Brian approached the house he heard a rattling shake then, with a terrific snarling and snapping, a dog leapt out of the barrel and flew at him. Brian yelped with fear and shot up into the air like a rocket. At once the dog doubled up on the vocal pyrotechnics, tugging on its metal chain and growling with great ferocity.

‘Sabre!’ A rectangle of golden light and Edie stood in the doorway. ‘Shut that bloody row.’ She held the door wider, smiling at Brian as he approached with admirable speed. ‘He won’t hurt you.’

‘Goodness.’ Brian gave vent to a costive chuckle. ‘Dogs don’t bother me. Quite the reverse in fact.’ Boldly he made as if to reverse his steps. ‘Here boy ...’

‘I shouldn’t pat him, all the same.’

‘Oh. Right.’

She did not make way for him to enter the house. Brian had to squeeze by, holding his breath apologetically, giddily aware of her lovely face, a mere kiss away from his own.

They were immediately in what Brian assumed must be the sitting room, though there wasn’t a lot of space to sit. One of the walls had almost vanished behind stacks of cardboard boxes labelled Sharp and Hitachi. The black-vinyl settee, disgorging foam chippings from various gashes and splits, looked as if it had been playfully gored by a bull. In the corner was the largest television set that Brian had ever seen. Vast, matt black, state-of-the-art Technic. On top of it was a wicker basket full of plastic flowers in violent shades of red and orange, and underneath, a video. A handsome ghetto blaster played pop music, very loudly. Clothes were lying about in untidy piles and a couple of dresses hung from the picture rail on wire hangers.

Edie did not even refer to the state of the place, let alone offer excuses, and Brian could not help but be impressed. His mother would apologise for the mess if one of her quilted salmon-velour scatter cushions, Velcroed into position across the back of the chesterfield, was an eighth of an inch out of true.

‘Make yourself at home then.’

‘Thank you.’ It was extremely warm. Brian unzipped his anorak, folded it carefully , laid it on the settee and sat on it. He was touched to notice one of the computer print-outs that he had handed out, heavily notated with Biro. He coughed nervously and looked around, searching for something to say. His eye fell on the boxes.

‘You ... er ... go in for hi-fis then, Edie?’

‘We’re collecting them. For the Multiple Scrolosis.’

‘Excellent.’ Brian was careful to keep the surprise from his voice. ‘Keep up the good work.’ Hyuf, hyuf.

‘You wanna drink?’

‘Thank you.’

She crossed over to an old, heavily carved 1950s sideboard covered with ornaments, glasses, more plastic flowers and birthday cards and opened it, producing a totally unfamiliar bottle.

‘To whom do I wish many happy returns, Edie?’

‘Me mum. Thirty-one yesterday.’

‘Good heavens.’ Younger than me. ‘Is she ... er ... around at this moment in time?’

‘No. It’s her weight-lifting night.’

He wanted to ask where Tom was, but feared seeming too obvious. He knew where her father was. Doing ten years for armed robbery in Albany.

‘Put the wood in the hole, Bri.’

At a loss he stared around then noticed a door standing open in the far corner, leading to some stairs. He closed it and leaned against the panels, raising his eyebrows whimsically. Then it struck him that this stance might look a bit threatening, so he moved back into the centre where he was given his drink.

‘Bottoms up, then,’ said Edie as he stood awkwardly clutching the smeary tumbler.

‘What is it?’

‘Thunderbirds Mixed Wine.’ She grinned. ‘It’s fruity. Apples and lemons and that.’

‘Aren’t you having any?’

‘Got to keep me head clear, haven’t I?’

‘Of course. Sorry.’

‘You’ll be leading me in wicked ways, Brian.’

More to smother this wondrous notion at birth than because he was thirsty Brian took a large gulp of the liquid, which exploded between his ears.

‘All right?’

‘Absolutely.’ He clutched the back of a chair. ‘Thunderbirds are go.’

‘You what?’

Of course she would be too young for the first TV series and too old to bother with the repeats. What a stupid thing to say. She’d think he was an absolute cretin.

Eyes closed, Edie was swaying now to the music, the arch of her back as strong, slender and supple as a steel spring, balancing gracefully on spiky, high-heeled shoes of patent leather that seemed slightly too big for her. Brian wondered if they belonged to her mother and the thought impelled feelings of excited tenderness. He boldly joined in, shifting clumsily from one foot to the other and clicking his fingers - off the beat, his ear for music being even worse than his ear for dialogue.

‘You wannanother drink?’ She had stopped dancing.

‘Better not. Thank you.’

‘Sit down then.’

Brian looked about him. The single armchair held video and audio tapes, freebie newspapers, some tights and a plate streaked with tomato sauce and dried egg yolk. He gravitated back to the settee.

This also held a certain amount of debris. Edie threw it all over the back. This move involved both kneeling and reaching and the narrow band of Lycra posing as a skirt was so tautly stretched that Brian could clearly see the cleft between her buttocks. He broke out into a warm glow, which he put down to the excessive heat from a three-bar electric fire.

‘So, young Edie.’ Keep it light and jocular. ‘How can I help?’ She bounced down beside him.

Well, fair enough. There was nothing in that. In fact, looking at it from a purely practical viewpoint, it was the only sensible place to choose. Not a lot of point in her sitting miles away in that cumbersome old armchair. If this was going to be a counselling session - and all the signs indicated that it was - then proximity was of the essence. He only hoped he would be able to hear what she was saying over the music. The driving, chopping beat was splintering his skull. He would have liked to ask that it be turned down, or even off, but was afraid she would think him square and middle-aged.

Edie settled, tucking her legs beneath her. Her shiny black tights had a single run, starting at the left knee and disappearing inside her leopard-spotted bandeau of a skirt. Somehow Brian dragged his eyes from the ladder and ordered his frenzied imagination to stop picturing its final resting place. Then he asked once more what he could do to allay her anxieties.

He spoke softly, knowing she would not be able to hear him, and, to his relief, the ploy worked. Edie got up and switched off the ghetto blaster at the plug. The fiery blooms on the television set also ceased their dazzle, wilting immediately into a tired bunch of dusty grey plastic.

‘Thing is Brian,’ she sat down again, surely fractionally closer than before? ‘I’m never going to be able to stand up in front of all them people.’

‘Of course you are. Once you step on-stage all those nerves will vanish. Believe me, I know.’

‘Then there’s my accent. I reckon she should talk better. More like a receptionist.’

‘Your accent’s perfect for the part.’

Even as he spoke it struck Brian that the remark might have been better phrased, for the character in question was a sluttish, foul-mouthed drug-addicted scrubber, on the dole and on the make when she wasn’t on the game. A type in fact not a million miles removed from Denzil’s deceased auntie, who made medical history, according to her nephew, by producing a death rattle in the vagina.

‘Actually,’ the fingers of her right hand, resting lightly on the edge of her skirt, curled inwards. Disappeared. ‘I find her whole personality difficult. She’s the sort that really gets on my tits. Know what I mean?’

‘Errkk ...’ Brian, mesmerised by the shifting movements beneath her skirt (was she stroking? scratching?), croaked, ‘Let’s hot-seat this one Edie, OK? Now - no pause for thought - one, two, three - why?’

‘The way she keeps pretending she don’t fancy Mick when it’s dead obvious she’s dying for it. Me - I’d come right up front and tell him.’

‘Ah - but that’s the fun of acting.’ He got the words out, though his voice had knots in. ‘Living the life, just for a while, of someone quite unlike yourself. You see, Edie, that’s the whole point of art. To sublimate brute facts.’

‘You’re really deep, Brian.’

Brian, about as deep as clingfilm but not nearly so useful, gave a falsely deprecating shrug.

‘But,’ continued Edie, ‘when you’ve finished sublimating, aren’t you just back where you started?’

Faced with this shattering perception Brian found himself lost for words. Edie looked at him hopefully for a moment then, with an air of disappointment, turned sadly away.

Shame that he had failed her jostled in Brian’s mind with a ravenous hunger as he studied that exquisite profile. Tiny parrots swung from golden perches in her ears. Wooden, brilliantly painted birds. Above one of them a question mark composed of punctures where all the studs and screws and pins had been. Observing this he became aware of a disturbing longing. A need to fondle, bite and kiss the grubby lobe. He put his hands together, trapping them firmly beneath his denimed knees.

‘Your wife know you’re round here, Brian?’

‘No.’ He arranged his features into a deep puzzlement, making it clear just how incomprehensible he found such a question. ‘She wasn’t in when I left. But I’m often out on school business. I don’t always give chapter and verse.’

‘Must be lovely to be married. Have your own little house and family.’

‘Don’t you believe it.’ Brian produced an arch but slightly anaemic hyuf, hyuf. ‘A man can die of domesticity.’

‘You’re not dead.’

‘I am inside.’

He regretted the words instantly. It was one thing for him and Edie to be equal when rehearsing. Be a hundred per cent open, there for each other and so forth. Quite another for him to reveal intimate and, worse, deeply unflattering aspects of his private life. It never occurred to Brian that displaying a deeply discontented and envious state of mind would endear him far more quickly to his group than the patronising jollity he familiarly employed.

‘Ohh Bri ...’ Edie sighed and rested her hand, laden with rings, sympathetically on his knee. ‘I’m ever so sorry.’

Brian flinched. His mouth was dry as sand. He stared down, almost cross-eyed with tension, at the badly chipped cyclamen nails.

‘All that was strictly entre nous, Edie.’

‘You what?’

‘I wouldn’t want you to tell anyone.’

‘What sort of person do you think I am?’ As quickly as she had leaned towards him she jerked away, her young face cold and hard. ‘You got a funny idea about friendship, you have.’

‘Oh - forgive me. I didn’t mean - Edie? Don’t go ...’ But she was already walking away. He watched her swaying across the sculptured whorls of purple carpet, watched the high, deliciously rounded leopardy buttocks jostling sweetly, cheek by cheek, against each other and thought that any minute he might well pass out. Now she was at the sideboard uncorking the Thunderbirds.

‘Wannanother?’

‘Yes! Yes, please. Thank you, Edie.’ He didn’t, but if it brought her back to his side perhaps he could ... Could what?

‘Then we can do my lines, if you like.’

She seemed to be pouring one for herself as well this time, looking across at him and smiling as sociably as if their sharp little exchange had never happened. This rapid and seemingly irrational change of mood, which was common to them all, was one of the things that Brian found hardest to understand. He himself was much given to sulking and withheld forgiveness relentlessly.

‘I gotta get them DLP,’ said Edie. ‘That right?’

‘Spot on.’

‘Remember what Denzil said it stood for?’

‘No.’ A lie, for even now, in fantasy, her lips and tongue nuzzled inside his jeans.

She put another tape in the ghetto blaster, this time disconnecting the florist’s lament. The music was slow, sweet and quiet.

‘Like it?’

‘Very much.’

‘So ...’ She gave him his drink, sat next to him and said, ‘Link up, then.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Like friends do.’

She slipped her arm through his then lifted her glass to her mouth, which movement drew their faces close. Her breath smelt of cigarette smoke and salt and vinegar crisps and an underlying pungency that reminded him of the science lab and that he recognised later as pear drops. Locked together thus, struggling and laughing, they drank. In his excitement and nervousness Brian spilled most of his.

‘Fuck,’ said Edie. ‘All down me jumper.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’ll dry.’

She drew away and, once more, her face came into focus. Mango lips, damp now with gleaming wine, huge violet-shadowed eyes, the lashes so thickly mascara’d they stuck out like tiny thorns. Her wonderful marmalade hair had been pinned up carelessly and several frondy, twisting curls escaped. She sat facing him, cross-legged, swallowing deeply and with languid relish.

Brian, bemooned, gazed back. He strove to come up with an innocuous remark, one that would neutralise the conversation and steer it firmly into strictly platonic channels. The only one that occurred (and recurred) was hopelessly inappropriate and much more likely to inflame than douse the situation. Tension clicking in his mind like a turnstile he delivered it anyway.

‘I’d have thought someone like you would have a boyfriend to come round and hear your lines.’

‘Him?’ Edie jeered. Brian felt a stab of disappointment that he had been proved right, tempered by a certain satisfaction at the scorn in her voice. ‘He’s useless.’

‘In what way?’

‘Every sodding way. He’s the original non-fattening centre. Know what I mean?’

Brian stared, uncomprehending. He was beginning to feel slightly zonked, what with the Thunderbirds, a surfeit of body warmth and the rampant excitement in his underwear. Certainly his brain must be addled because, for the life of him, he could not spot any causal link between an unsatisfactory suitor and a box of Maltesers. Unless she meant he never brought her any.

‘I bet your wife don’t have no problems in that department.’

Edie winked, but Brian missed it for his glance, having roamed across the curve of her belly and climbed that unbearably sexy ladder, had now come to rest on the thin, wraparound top, the damp sections of which were clinging very closely indeed.

‘That can’t be very comfortable.’ He spoke through stiff lips and, although nothing in her expression changed, he knew that some invisible barrier had been crossed. That he would no longer be able to get up and walk away. Even so he was completely unprepared for the speed of the next development.

‘You’re right,’ murmured Edie. ‘I’ll catch me death.’

Without taking her eyes off his face she pulled at the securing ties behind her back. The garment fell apart, revealing beautiful, blue veined, pearly-white breasts with raspberry tips. Brian stared, dumbstruck with exhilaration and fear. Then she leaned forward, uncoiled a tongue like a humming bird’s and slid it into his ear.

Brian panted and groaned. He felt so dizzy he thought he might lose consciousness.

‘Touch me Bri ... come on ... quick ...’

‘Ohhh ... Edie ...’

‘Give us your hand ...’

‘They’re so beautiful.’

‘Harder ... between your fingertips ... rub ...’

‘I’ve dreamed of this.’

‘Yeah. Me an all.’

‘I picture you, Edie, every time I’m having it.’

‘Naughty.’

‘Makes me ... you know ...’

‘He’s all wired up - arncha, Brian?’

‘Yes,’ cried Brian, not knowing what it meant but knowing that he was.

‘Fancy moving down a bit?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I saw you. Looking at my legs.’

‘Such pretty legs.’

‘Want to climb my little ladder, don’t you?’

‘Yes, yes ...’

‘Go on then.’

‘Eeny, meeny, miny ...’

‘You’re ever so good with your hands, aren’t you, Brian?’

‘No complaints so far.’

‘Shelves and that.’

‘Nnnnggghhh!’

‘Got to Mo have you?’

‘Ohh Edie.’ Suddenly her tights were round her ankles and her fingers were tugging at his shirt. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Taking this off. Fair’s fair.’

‘I’m ... a bit thin. Never had time to work out.’

‘Not thin down here though, are you, Brian?’

‘Yipes!’

‘Not thin where it matters.’

‘That hurt, actually.’

‘Now your jeans.’

‘Are you sure the door’s—’

‘Can’t screw with your jeans on.’ Edie canted up her skirt, then reached out and tickled his beard.

‘Don’t do that.’

‘What are all them bumps?’

‘Could we have the light off?’

‘More fun with it on.’

‘Nuff said.’

‘I don’t half want it, Brian.’

‘Um ... I’ve never been—I’ve never done—’

‘Well, now’s the time to start. That’s it. Oooh - lovely. Off you go then.’

And off Brian went but not, alas, for long. In what Denzil would have called a hare’s breath it was all over. They uncoupled with a sad squelch. Edie swung her legs sideways and rested on the edge of the settee. Brian hovered apologetically. On the wall the light carved out their silhouettes. Brian said, ‘Sorry. I’m afraid it was the excitement.’

‘What excitement?’

Then, as quickly as she had slithered out of her tights, she was dressed again and walking away. Brian sat gloomily down on the gummy vinyl and watched as Edie lifted up the egg-streaked plate in the armchair and retrieved a shiny packet of Rothman’s King Size together with a match folder. She put a cigarette in her mouth and flicked a match against her thumbnail.

‘Wanna fag?’

‘I don’t, thank you, Edie.’

Brian became uncomfortably aware of a broken spring sticking into his bottom. One side of him, closely adjacent to the fiercely glowing bars of the electric fire, was crackling nicely. The other goose-pimpled fast. Surreptitiously he watched Edie. Her cheeks were sucked into hollows by vigorous inhalation. Smoke poured from her nostrils. She was as totally and utterly separate from him as if their conjoining had never been. He had a terrible headache from the wine and was wondering if he might ask for a cup of tea. About to speak he realised that she was, in fact, speaking to him.

‘Sorry - I didn’t get that.’

‘I said me mum’ll be back any minute.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Brian nearly fell off the settee. He scrambled up, seizing his clothes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I am telling you.’

‘Come on ... come on ...’ He started swearing at his shirt, punching the flapping folds with his fist, searching for the armholes, finding them, ramming his arms in.

‘That’s inside out.’

‘Shit.’

‘More haste less speed, eh, Bri?’

He tore at the sleeves with fingers like huge, sweating sausages, pulled them through to the right side and buttoned the shirt up, skew-whiff.

‘You’ve got the wrong—’

‘Yes, I am aware of that. Thank you.’

She shrugged and, picking up a pair of tights from the pile on the armchair, went over to the settee and started mopping up the traces.

‘Where are my underpants?’ shouted Brian, only half to himself.

‘How should I know?’ She threw the tights over the back of the settee.

Brian gave up looking. He pulled on the He Man jeans, stuffing his slippery genitals inside. He got them safely past the zip only to catch them on the semi-upright prongs of a row of copper rivets. Tears sprang to his eyes and he howled in fury and distress.

‘Not your night, is it?’

Somehow he got into his windcheater. By now his mind had become swamped by images of gigantism. He saw Mrs Carter, muscles engorged with newly pumped blood, bestriding the threshold like a colossus, preventing his escape. Tossing him about the room like a shuttlecock. Eating him alive.

Edie was holding the door open. Drowning in appalled anticipation, Brian shot through and out into the freezing cold.

By twenty-two hundred hours the outside team had all returned to the station and debriefing began. Like many a Christmas morning it held quite a few unwelcome surprises as various items of information were offered that no one had expected to find in their stocking and did not quite know what to make of now they had.

Extensive and thorough questioning of prostitutes on the streets and around the clubs of Uxbridge had, so far, produced no lead on the blonde in the taxi. However, many of the girls did not show themselves until late evening, so enquiries would continue throughout the night and into the next day if necessary.

No luck either in finding the driver who had picked her up at Plover’s Rest and taken her wherever she wished to go. All freelance cabbies within a twelve-mile radius of the village had been followed up, as well as every one in Causton. Luck though, of a sort, with Hadleigh’s removal van.

‘Came across an old biddy,’ said Inspector Meredith, ‘who actually recalls not only the day itself but the name of the firm.’ He ruffled his pages and continued, abandoning his natural drawl for what he appeared to regard as a South Bucks working-class accent.

‘Oi remember thaat corz thaat was Beech Hams and moy maam used to give uz Beech Hams pills.’ He chortled, no doubt at the quaintness of old peasant biddydom in general and this crusty old example in particular.

Nobody joined in. Barnaby watched the inspector sourly. He was closing his notebook now, no doubt after memorising the fragment of folklore to entertain his chums. They’d be pissing themselves at the Athenaeum over that one.

‘Her name I believe,’ concluded Meredith, ‘was Mrs Staggles.’

‘Well, whatever her name is,’ replied the chief inspector, ‘she’s certainly a long way from her native Norfolk. I trust,’ he carried on quickly over the laughter, which he perceived to derive as much from pleasure at Meredith’s displacement as at his own wit, ‘you didn’t leave the matter there?’

‘Naturally not.’ Skin extremely tight around the eyes. ‘The firm, it appears, was taken over a year ago by a much larger company. Cox’s of Slough. They didn’t keep any of the staff - there were only half a dozen - but did take their names and addresses in case there were vacancies sometime in the future. I plan to talk to any who are still living locally, tomorrow.’

‘I shall be interested to hear the result,’ said Barnaby. ‘I think you may well find that they did not move Hadleigh’s stuff from Kent, as we’ve been led to believe, after all.’

‘Really, sir? What makes you say that?’

Barnaby briefly described his visit to the solicitor’s and the reading of the will, which filled the room with some surprise and quite a few whistles of envy.

‘The more we seem to discover about Hadleigh,’ continued the chief inspector, ‘the more we find ourselves on shifting sands. We’ve been unable to find any record of his marriage in the year that he implied it had taken place. We’re trying to trace an insurance number but the name is not all that uncommon and we have no date of birth to go on. The Department of Agriculture at Whitehall are checking their records but, quite frankly, I’ve little hope in that direction either. It’s becoming plain, I’m afraid, that Hadleigh was a man bent on concealment. At this stage we can only guess at whether what he took such pains to conceal was connected with his death.’

Barnaby sat back, watching his team take all this in. Personally he found these conclusions totally depressing. He was not a man to relish complication for the sake of complication, as Nicholas had discovered while trying to teach his father-in-law to play chess.

Policewoman Audrey Brierley started smoothing her neat cap of shining hair, a nervous habit she indulged when speaking in front of a group. ‘But why would anyone make up a whole set of lies about themselves, sir?’

‘A good question.’

‘Have we checked if he’s got form?’ asked Inspector Meredith.

‘Yes, we have,’ said Barnaby crisply. ‘And no, he hasn’t.’

‘Not under that name,’ said Audrey.

‘Precisely. The fact that it’s proving so difficult to pin him down suggests that the name is false. And it may not be the only alias.’

‘Maybe he’s a cut and runner,’ said Troy. ‘Wife and kids all too much - buggers off. Or a bigamist.’

‘I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility ...’ Inspector Meredith, who had not waited for the previous speaker to finish, leaned back in his chair. He crossed one elegant tweed leg over the other and lowered his narrow head as if thanking his muse for this, the latest in a long line of inspiration. If he puts the tips of his fingers together, thought Barnaby, and rests his chin on them, I will personally go over there and bash his head on the floor till his brains rattle.

‘The possibility,’ reprised the inspector, ‘that what we may have here is an official make-over. If Hadleigh had been some kind of supergrass a complete change of location, totally new background and identity could have been part of a deal. I have a connection in the Home Office and would be glad—’

‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

Barnaby, having a rough idea what such transformations could cost, suspected they were very rare indeed. He also knew how close the Home Office played such matters to its chest. Still, the suggestion could not be entirely discounted. He only wished someone else had made it.

‘Maybe Jennings will be able to fill in some of the blanks, sir,’ said Detective Constable Willoughby. ‘Are you going to be putting out a press release about him soon?’

‘I thought we’d give it another twenty-four hours, but if there’s no trace by then of the man or his car, I’m afraid we’ll have to.’ Barnaby rose to his feet, saying, ‘Right. If that’s it ... ?’

Glancing about he noticed Inspector Meredith’s sudden frown and look of increased concentration, as if some perception or other had occurred. The man looked alert within himself. Barnaby said, ‘Well, inspector?’

‘Sir?’

‘The little grey cells working overtime again?’ There were a few toadying snickers and Barnaby chided himself for such petty spite. It was hardly Meredith’s fault that the system upgraded graduates to inspector in four years whilst making hard-working, foot-slogging, intelligent constables hang around for fifteen. He drained the acid from his voice before continuing.

‘You’ve had an idea, I think?’

‘No, sir.’

At that point the night shift arrived. Barnaby checked his desk over and made for the door, his mind already closing on the anticipatory pleasures of the kitchen. Herbs and mushrooms to be chopped, liver to be thinly sliced. A glass of the ’90 Crozes-Hermitage while he worked. What could be nicer?

As he passed the windows of the incident room on his way to the car park he noticed that Inspector Meredith was still there. Utterly engrossed, his fingers were tapping busily at a computer keyboard as his snaky head, quite still and urgently attentive, studied the screen.