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hours following a killing. Because few murders were revealed as quickly as this one had been, you didn’t often get the chance to see the reactions of suspects in this key period. And he had been denied it.
    John Lambert was an anachronism among superintendents, in that he didn’t direct a murder hunt from behind his desk at the station. He left DI Rushton to collate the vast mountain of information which poured in from a murder-hunt team, whilst he pursued the investigation directly in the world outside. His methods were tolerated, because they had brought results. And he wasn’t going to change now, in the last years of his service.
    Rushton was a good officer, Lambert told himself, meticulous to a fault. He wouldn’t have missed anything last night. It was egomania in him to imagine that he might have picked up what his Inspector had missed. He tried to silence those mischievous cells at the back of his brain which insisted that Rushton was a creature of routine, not imagination, who would have done exactly what the book said he should do last night, but perhaps missed some reaction in one of the diners in the restaurant which he should have picked up as significant.
    He knocked on a door and went through to the private living quarters above the restaurant of Fred and Paula Soutter. Paula was white-faced and shocked, though it was now ten hours after the discovery of the body of the man who had hosted what had seemed such a successful evening. Lambert knew the pair, for he had used the restaurant often enough himself. He smiled at Paula Soutter as encouragingly as he could and turned to her husband. ‘Sorry about all this, Fred!’ The movement of his head took in the three police cars outside, the plastic tapes around the entrance, the ‘Closed until Further Notice’ sign by the entrance to Soutters.
    â€˜Can’t be helped.’ Fred shrugged shoulders which had had to cope with all manner of culinary crises over the years.
    â€˜We’ll have you open again as soon as we can. Possibly as soon as this evening, if the scenes of crime team decide they’ve gathered everything they can from here.’
    â€˜Thanks. It’s a busy time for us, coming up to Christmas.’
    â€˜You’ll probably find it helps your bookings in the long term. Murder has a certain grisly glamour, especially for those innocents who’ve never been in contact with it.’
    â€˜I suppose so. The press boys are already clamouring for pictures of our cloakrooms.’ Fred Soutter smiled ruefully.
    â€˜I wanted to check a couple of things with you. First, are any of your knives missing from the kitchen?’
    â€˜No. I’ve checked again this morning. And all the cutlery used in the restaurant is still here.’
    â€˜Right. And could anyone who wasn’t a customer have got into the cloakrooms from outside during the evening?’
    â€˜No. The outside doors and the entrance to our own accommodation are locked throughout the evening, when the restaurant is open.’
    â€˜So that the only way someone from outside the dining party could have been in there is to have secreted himself beforehand, locked himself in a cubicle, and waited three hours or so for his chance to kill.’
    â€˜That’s impossible.’
    â€˜I know it’s unlikely, but—’
    â€˜Not unlikely. Impossible. One of the things I try to do while Paula is serving the aperitifs and taking the orders at the beginning of the evening is to do a quick inspection tour of the cloakrooms to ensure that things there are exactly as they should be at the beginning of the evening.’
    â€˜And you did this last night?’
    â€˜I did. After I’d locked all the outer doors. There was no one in any of the cubicles.’
    Lambert nodded, pausing for a moment to let the implications sink in to these people who were not used to murder. Then he turned to the white-faced Paula Soutter. ‘You