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trying to shrug away his melancholy in a determination to get on with his work. There was a murder to occupy him: the death of this girl Kate Wharton. He had always felt a little guilty about the way he relished a murder investigation, though he knew that it was only the hunter’s instinct which every successful CID officer must have. There wasn’t much to go on yet in this one. But this hunt more than any other must conclude with an arrest.
    This might be his very last murder.

 
    Five
     
    The next morning was overcast, with enough nip in the air to remind everyone that this was still an English spring, even if it was the ninth of May. Bert Hook picked Mrs Julie Wharton up at nine o’clock to take her to identify the body of her murdered daughter.
    She was ready for him, so that she had no need to invite him to re-enter the quiet house. But DS Hook had looked up the row of small rear gardens as he turned into the road, and his observant policeman’s eye had noticed a line of washing behind the house of Mrs Wharton. A line which contained men’s underwear, socks and shirts. So it seemed that this enigmatic woman probably did not live alone. There was a man about the place, though she had volunteered no information about his presence on the previous day.
    She wore a dark blue coat above sheer nylon tights and navy shoes, dressed as decorously as if she were bound for a funeral. But there were no signs of distress about her appearance or her bearing; she was as carefully made up as on the previous day beneath her neatly cut dark hair. She said, ‘I could have driven there myself, you know. There was no need for you to collect me.’
    Bert smiled. ‘We like to give what little support we can. This can be a distressing experience.’ He wondered if she realized that he was curious to detect how she really felt about this dead daughter, that he did not accept the emotionless front she had presented on the previous afternoon.
    Whatever her thoughts, she revealed little about herself on the way to the mortuary, and Bert was too conscious of the stressful nature of the task ahead to press her to speak. She volunteered the information that she had not seen Kate for ‘at least a month’ before her death, and he deduced, though she did not put it into words, that there had been little intimacy between mother and daughter.
    He wondered when and how the relationship had gone astray. Bert, a late entrant to the lottery of marriage, was the father of two boisterous boys and no daughters, but he had always thought that the mother-daughter bond was the strongest of all ties, the one most likely to survive the traumas of adolescence. So he presumed that the quiet, contained woman beside him had been close to the dead girl at one time, that something quite serious must have occurred to fracture the relationship.
    But he gained nothing from Julie Wharton, who behaved as though the coolness between mother and daughter, which she had tacitly suggested, was the most natural thing in the world. He glanced sideways at her as he turned into the neat, aseptic surrounds of the mortuary and parked the police Mondeo beside the only other two cars which were there. If she felt any inner turmoil at the approaching ordeal, she gave no sign of it. She stared straight ahead at the brick walls of the low building; the profile of her strong, square face might have been cast in bronze.
    The attendant outside the identification room was more nervous than she was. He was not used to meeting such composure in the close relatives of the corpses which were the centre of his working world. He fretted a little over the completion of the familiar forms, showed her unnecessarily where she would sign in due course, stumbled a little as he explained the procedure. Hook could have sworn there was a little impatience in the nods with which Julie Wharton acknowledged his instructions.
    It was Hook who asked her the final routine question. ‘Would you like a moment