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the girl keep him? If she doesn’t care for him she could have had him adopted. Plenty of people would—would treasure him. It’s so wrong. The whole thing is. The girl’s only just left school and she’s out clubbing till all hours. I don’t know what’s happened to people, and so fast. Twenty years and their whole attitude to life has changed.”
    â€œPerhaps we need to know them a little better before we’re so judgmental.” Wexford felt sweat running down his chest and he wished he had a clean shirt to change into before the journalists came. “They’ve had about the worst shock they could have had. D’you know what affected me most? Brand calling for his mother.”
    â€œIt didn’t even seem to touch that Diana. It’s enough to break your heart, yet it didn’t even seem to touch her.” He looked at Wexford almost suspiciously. “What are you thinking now?”
    Not often inclined to lie, Wexford saw no need to be truthful about his thoughts. “Just that I’d rather face the London papers anytime than that new guy on the
Courier.
”
    He returned to what truly occupied his mind, his own daughter.

CHAPTER 5
----
    T he conference lasted only a short time. There was little for Wexford and Sergeant Vine to tell the press and for once Darren Lovelace, the new man on the
Courier,
failed to make a nuisance of himself. Wexford spoke for two minutes on BBC 1 ’s regional evening news and for three on Mid-Sussex Radio, and then it was over.
    â€œAre you going to put Marshalson on to make an appeal?” Burden asked him.
    â€œYou know, I don’t think I’m ever going to do that with anyone again. For one thing, it happens so often these days, it’s so much routine, the public have got blasé about it. They probably switch off when the parent or lover or wife comes on, begging for the person who’s killed their loved one—as we’re supposed to call relatives—to come forward. Then there’s the awkward fact that the bereaved one often turns out to be the killer.”
    â€œYou don’t mean you suspect Marshalson?”
    â€œAt this point, Mike, I have no suspects.”
    Resisting Burden’s urging him to a drink in the Olive and Dove, Wexford went home, thinking how he had said earlier that their roles were reversed that day, for it was usually he who persuaded the inspector to after-hours meals and drinks and seldom the other way about. He wanted very much to hear what his wife had to say about Sylvia.
    That she was pregnant and without husband or partner he already knew, and that there was something wrong. Dora had told him that, had told him what she knew, which wasn’t much. Wrong with her or with the baby, neither knew, but Sylvia had promised to see her mother that day and tell her “the whole thing.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?” he had asked.
    â€œI don’t know, Reg. I wish she hadn’t told me that much. I keep thinking she’s found out the baby’s got one chromosome too many or not enough. I just wish we’d been left in ignorance.”
    â€œSo do I.”
    Like all his neighbors’, and almost every private house in Kingsmarkham except those in Ploughman’s Lane, Wexford’s house was without air-conditioning. All the windows were open, including the French windows in the living room, and since the garden outside had lain in shadow for some hours, the room was a lot less hot than it might have been. A breeze had risen and fluttered the heavy-hanging leaves of lilacs.
    â€œI’m going to have a drink,” Wexford said.
    His wife’s reply he had never heard on her lips before. “Yes, I think you should. And get me one, would you? There’s Sauvignon in the fridge and it should be icy cold by now.”
    A fertile imagination is more trouble than it’s worth. So he often thought and did now as he poured the wine