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‘Studying for her A-levels, I suppose.’ She made it sound an unworthy, even slightly disgraceful thing for her daughter to have been doing.
    There was something wrong with this description of how the evening had been passed, something incongruous, only Wexford couldn’t put his finger on what.
    ‘I’d like to talk to Sara,’ he said.
    ‘Do as you like.’
    She twisted round in her chair and looked fully at him, the television for the moment forgotten.
    ‘She’ll be in her bedroom but you can go up. She won’t object.’ The awful laugh came. ‘Rather the reverse if I know her.’
    4
     So young Sara, who looked like one of Botticelli’s girls, a Quattrocento virgin, had been caught in bed with a boyfriend. Or not in bed, most probably. On the yellow plastic settee or in the back of a car. It was difficult with daughters. You knew what your enlightened principles were but things looked different when it was your daughter. Still, that hardly justified Joy’s snide insinuation. Wexford, going upstairs, decided that as well as disliking what he knew of Williams, he didn’t care for Mrs Williams either. Not that it mattered whether he liked them or not. It made no difference. Perhaps the woman did have some justification. She was going through a bad time; she, who was surely in the process of losing her man, would feel bitter towards a daughter gaining one. And the discovery of Sara and the boy might have been made very recently.
    He knew which bedroom it was because music was coming from behind the door. Rock music of some kind, soft with a monotonous drumbeat. She must have heard his feet on the stairs by now. He had taken care to make a bit of noise, not difficult on the linoleum covered with thin haircord. He knocked on the door.
    She didn’t say, ‘Come in!’ She opened it herself. Wexford had often noted reactions to a knock at the door. They offered indications of character and motivation. The woman, for example, who calls out ‘Come in!’ is more open, relaxed and easy-going than she who opens the door herself. The latter will be cagey and reserved. In the thirty seconds or so before she opens the door, what has she put away in a drawer or hidden under a magazine?
    He could see that Sara had created the room herself. What attractiveness it had had nothing to do with the furniture, carpet and curtains provided by her parents. It was the smallest bedroom. Wexford had had an extension built on to his house when the girls were little but this house remained as it had originally been. There would be a large front bedroom for the husband and wife, a slightly smaller back bedroom—in this case for the son—and a tiny boxroom no more than nine feet by seven for the daughter. She had put posters all over the walls, one of a red horse galloping in the snow from the Yugoslav Naive school of painting, another of a thin naked black man playing a guitar. Between them hung a tennis racket, a corn dolly and a montage of Tarot cards. Perhaps the most striking poster was the one that faced the door. A harpy like creature with the head and breasts of a woman and the body, wings and claws of a raven, clutched at an unfurling ribbon on which was painted the name—acronym?— ARRIA. Wexford remembered the tee-shirt Sara had been wearing when first they met. The raven woman had a face like Britannia or maybe Boadicea, one of those noble, handsome, courageous, fanatical faces, that made you feel like locking up the knives and reaching for the Valium.
    Bookshelves that looked as if put up by Sara herself held a paperback Life of Freud, Phyllis Grosskurth’s Havelock Ellis, Fromm, Laing, Freud on the Wolf Man and Leonardo, Erin Pizzey and Jeff Shapiro on incest and child abuse, but not a single work of fiction. With her tiny radio providing background music, she had been sitting at a dressing table that doubled as a desk, swotting for an exam. It was evidently chemistry. The textbook lay open at a page of