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he would be the last person I’d want around if I had problems. He’s one of those who are always ready to tell you what you ought to do, even if any idiot can see you’re in no state to do it. When Nev had his breakdown, his father just stood over him telling him to pull himself together! What use is that?
    ‘Why, when you came home and, according to what you told Sergeant Parry and me, you cooked sausages, didn’t someone go upstairs and ask Theresa if she wanted to join you? Didn’t you usually eat together?’
    I don’t know why she had to repeat the same set of questions so many times in as many ways. Either she was slow to get the picture, or she thought that, eventually, I’d start contradicting myself.
    I repeated for the n th time, ‘I told you, Nev and I had already eaten and Nev’s vegetarian. You can check everything I’ve said. I don’t know what Terry did after we left her Monday midday. We didn’t go up to her room when we got in because we thought she was out of the house and would be back later. I also told you she didn’t confide in us. She just went off and did her own thing.’
    ‘So why did you go up to her room this morning? Had something happened to make you suspicious?’
    ‘No! We just thought she’d gone for good – and we were checking.’
    But she had gone for good, poor Terry. I wished I’d phrased it differently. All the same, trust her to make trouble for everyone else, even in dying.
    The image kept coming back to me, although I tried to keep it away. It was as if that hanging body was there in the room with us, the purplish-black face which hadn’t looked like Terry at all, her delicate features bloated and discoloured and her swollen tongue protruding at us in a grotesque, childish gesture of defiance.
    It seemed Morgan could read my mind. ‘When you found her, Francesca, did you notice the bruises?’
    The alarm bells were jangling ever louder. Every visible bit of Terry’s skin had been mottled mauve and grey when I saw her, but since then, a doctor must have had a closer look. They couldn’t have done a post mortem yet, only a preliminary check, establishing death. But someone, unless Janice was even more devious than I had already credited, had noticed bruises.
    ‘You mean, as if she’d fallen?’ I, too, could be devious.
    ‘Uh-huh. More as if someone had hit her.’
    ‘Someone had roughed her up recently?’ This was very bad news.
    ‘Well, we don’t know, do we, Francesca.’ She gave me that rictus smile. ‘Or at least, I don’t. There appear, on cursory examination, to be bruises on her thighs and upper arms and a serious contusion on the side of her head resulting from a blow hard enough to knock her cold. Also a graze on the right hip.’
    Getting worse.
    ‘So I’ll ask again, were there ever any fights in that house?’
    ‘I’ll tell you again, no! We may have had a few spats. No punches were thrown – ever!’
    ‘These spats? Were they ever – emotional in origin?’
    I sighed. ‘Whom would we have been fighting over? Nev? Squib? You’ve got to be joking. We had house rules and it kept the peace, more or less.’
    But I was thinking of something else. Janice was, too.
    ‘How about the way she was dressed, when you found her. Did it strike you as unusual?’
    I admitted it bothered me a little.
    ‘It bothers me, too,’ she said. ‘Jeans and a shirt. No underwear of any kind. Did she usually go around without any knickers on?’
    ‘How should I know?’ I snapped. ‘She never wore a bra. She didn’t have much to put in one. The graze on the hip. Was the skin broken?’
    ‘Definitely and a couple of wood splinters lodged in it. Forensics will find the origin of those. Did she ever bring men back to the house?’ The last question was slipped in like a knife beneath my guard. I knew what she was getting at, but I thought she was wrong.
    ‘She didn’t bring back anyone, male or female. If she was on the game, she was operating well away