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turn round, he might even have seen me on the doorstep.’
    ‘I’m more interested in whether he saw someone else in the street. Did you see anyone?’
    Julie shook her head.
    ‘Take a bit of time,’ Vera said. ‘There might be something. See if you can rerun it in your head like a film. Talk me through it. From the taxi pulling up.’
    So there on the wide and empty beach, with the gulls screaming over her head and the tide sucking at her feet, Julie shut her eyes and felt the dizziness that had hit her when she first stepped out of the taxi. ‘I was drunk,’ she said. ‘Not fall-in-the-gutter drunk, but not really with it. Everything spinning. You know how it is?’ Because she was sure that Vera had been drunk in her time. She’d be a good person to get drunk with.
    ‘I know.’ She gave Julie a minute. ‘Did you hear anything unusual?’
    ‘Nothing at all. I noticed how quiet it was. Usually there’s traffic on the main road through the village. It’s always there so you don’t hear it. Last night there was nothing. Not when I was opening the door’ She frowned.
    ‘But later? When the door was open?’
    ‘A car started up in the street.’
    ‘Could it have been the taxi, turning round?’
    ‘No. This was the ignition being switched on, the engine revving. It’s a different sound, isn’t it, from a car that’s already running?’
    ‘Quite different,’ Vera said.
    ‘It must have been parked down the street, near the junction with the road into town. That’s the direction the sound came from.’
    ‘So you’d have passed it in the taxi on your way in?’
    ‘Must have done.’
    ‘Don’t suppose you noticed it? A strange car? Not belonging to one of the usual residents?’ Her voice was so studied and casual that Julie knew it was important.
    ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have done.’ But she shut her eyes again and concentrated. They’d come over the humped-back bridge and she’d leaned forward to tell the driver to slow down because they were nearly there. There’s a nasty right-hand turn just on the corner And at the same time she was pulling her purse out of her bag, so there wouldn’t be that embarrassing last-minute fumble for payment. Lisa and Jan had already given her more than their share so she knew she had the cash. There’d been nothing coming in the opposite direction and the taxi driver had pulled into her street without having to stop. And there had been a car. Almost on the corner. Parked outside the bungalow where Mr Grey lived. She’d wondered about that because Mr Grey hadn’t driven since he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and everyone knew his only son lived in Australia. She remembered because she’d wondered if the car might belong to the doctor, if there was some emergency. And she’d looked to see if there were any lights on, thinking of the gossip she could pass on to Sal. But the house had been dark. And anyway it had been a small car. Not the sort a doctor would drive.
    All this she told Vera.
    ‘I don’t know what make it was.’
    ‘Never mind, pet. It gives us something to work on. One of your neighbours might have seen it.’
    The scally boys were throwing a football around, bouncing it hard in the wet sand, so muddy spray flew all over their clothes. Their mothers will kill them, Julie thought.
    ‘Home,’ Vera said. ‘Are you ready?’
    Julie almost said she never wanted to go home.
    ‘Laura will be awake. She’ll be needing you.’ Vera stamped away towards the sand hills, leaving Julie no option but to follow.
    Arriving back in the street, it was as if she was seeing it for the first time. Part of her was still on the beach with the sound of the gulls and all that space. Hard to think of this as home. A cul-de-sac ending in reclaimed farmland. Once there’d been the slag heap from the pit, but now there were fields all the way to the coast. Old folks’ bungalows on one side of the street, each with a ramp to the pavement and a hand