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to collect you to view Edith’s body, or a body which might be Edith. He said it was the first indication you’ll get . . . two call, the police have questions, but if one calls it’s because they have found her body.’
    â€˜Or a body,’ Webster replied. ‘But yes, your neighbour is essentially correct.’
    â€˜I’ll get my coat . . . just a minute, please.’ Hemmings turned and went back inside his house.
    In the car, driving to York District Hospital, Webster broke the uncomfortable silence by saying, ‘It won’t be like you might have seen in the films . . .’
    â€˜No?’ Hemmings turned to Webster.
    â€˜No, they won’t pull a sheet back and reveal her head and face, it will be done quite cleverly, you’ll see her through a glass window, a pane of glass, heavy velvet curtains will be pulled back and you’ll see her. She will be lying on a trolley with her head and face tightly bandaged with the sheets tucked in tightly round her body. You will see nothing else. It will look like she is floating in space, in complete blackness. If it is your lady wife, it will be the final image you will have of her. It’s a better image to keep in your mind than one of her being in a metal drawer.’
    â€˜Yes, thank you. Thank you for telling me that. I appreciate it and you are right, it will be a much better last memory, because it will be her. I know it. In my bones I know it will be her.’
    Later in an interview suite at Micklegate Bar Police Station and comforted with a hot mug of sweetened tea, Stanley Hemmings said, ‘She was a Canadian, you know.’
    â€˜Canadian?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Hemmings nodded. Webster again saw him as small, like his late wife, but now also noticed that he was barrel-chested with strong-looking arms and legs.
    â€˜Yes . . . specifically Canadienne.’ Hemmings saw the puzzled look cross Reginald Webster’s eyes and so he spelled the word for him. ‘It means, among other things, a French Canadian female, or so she explained to me. “ Je suis Canadienne ,” she said when we first met. I remembered from school what “ Je suis ” meant, it’s the sum of my French, and so she had to explain the rest. She apparently spoke French as they speak it in Quebec province, that is to say with a very distinct accent, in fact I found out that in Quebec they speak French like they speak English in Glasgow, not just a distinct accent but unique in terms of phrase and strange use of words. Just as the Scots will use “how” to mean “why”, so the French Canadians have their own variation of the French language. But she and I always talked in English anyway. We had to, for heaven’s sake.’
    Hennessey sat silently next to Webster and opposite Hemmings in the softly decorated and carpeted orange-hued interview suite. He felt that Mr and Mrs Hemmings probably would have made an odd couple in life, more because of their personalities than anything else. Hennessey, for some reason, thought that Edith Hemmings must have been a spirited person in life, the clothes she wore, her courageous presence of mind in hiding the electricity bill in her shoe, that, he felt, showed initiative. And she had been adventurous enough to relocate from Canada. Yet here was her husband who dressed in a dull manner, and had a monotonous tone of voice . . . almost whiny, Hennessey thought. Her hairstyle contrasted with his centre-parted style, attached to his skull with cream as if he was the very caricature of a Victorian railway booking clerk. The image of them as a couple didn’t gel in his mind. He also found the job that Hemmings gave, ‘an under manager in the biscuit factory’, not the sort of job that would attract a woman of Edith Hemmings’s taste in clothes, and he was a man who whined about having to take time off work while