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Swilley.
    â€˜Always have been,’ she said, but with some reservation in her voice Swilley didn’t understand.
    â€˜Did she tell you anything about her plans for the weekend?’
    â€˜She said she was going out for a drink with friends on Friday evening. It was her best friend Kiera’s birthday, and they were meeting some others at the Princess Vic.’
    â€˜And what about the rest of the weekend?’
    â€˜She said she hadn’t any plans. Scott – her boyfriend?’
    Swilley nodded.
    â€˜He was going away for the weekend, so she said she was just going to relax. I asked her to come for Sunday lunch but she said she had some work to catch up on. She’s a palaeontologist, you know,’ she added with a huge pride that carried the touch of bewilderment of any parent whose child surpasses them by such a length. ‘She works at the Natural History Museum. They think the world of her there. I don’t know where she gets her brains from,’ she added with a little affected laugh. ‘It can’t be me. I was never even in the sixth form.’
    â€˜From her father, perhaps?’ Swilley suggested, wanting to keep her talking.
    A shadow passed over Mrs Wiseman’s face: it looked to Swilley almost like wariness. ‘Her father’s dead,’ she said abruptly.
    â€˜Oh, I’m sorry.’
    â€˜He was killed in the Greenford rail crash,’ she said, as though that ended the topic for good and all. That had been – Swilley counted – eleven years ago: it had been in all the papers, of course. Rail crashes were so thankfully rare, they were all remembered, catalogued in the public mind for ever by their location: Potters Bar, Hatfield, Southall . . . Greenford had had an unusually high number of fatalities. ‘Ian’s my second husband,’ Mrs Wiseman concluded.
    â€˜Of course,’ Swilley said. ‘That accounts for why Melanie has a different surname. And Bethany is . . .?’
    â€˜She’s Ian’s, from his first wife. He was a widower too.’
    â€˜So has Melanie any brothers or sisters?’
    â€˜No, I just had the one. Why do you ask?’
    â€˜I’m wondering if there was anyone she might have gone to visit, that’s all. Any aunts, cousins?’
    â€˜Not that she’d go and visit. I’ve got a sister, but we’re not close, and Melanie never cared that much for her cousins.’
    â€˜What about your husband’s family?’
    â€˜You mean Ian’s? Oh, she would never go to them ,’ she said firmly.
    â€˜Does she not get on with her stepfather?’
    â€˜They’re all right, they get on OK, but they’re not what I’d call close. She doesn’t think of him as her stepfather, anyway, just my husband. No reason why she should. She was practically grown up by the time I married, and I told her from the beginning, I’m not marrying him for you, I’m marrying him for me.’
    Some history there, Swilley thought, making a mental note. Smoothly she went on, ‘What about her boyfriend, Scott? Is everything all right between them?’
    â€˜Oh yes,’ she said with enthusiasm. ‘He’s a lovely boy – just the sort of man I always wanted for her. Steady, nice manners, a good job. Very polite to me and Ian. And they’re mad about each other, no doubt about that.’
    â€˜But he went away for the weekend without her,’ Swilley suggested. ‘Did she mind that?’
    â€˜Oh no,’ she said quickly. ‘You mustn’t think that. You see, Scott’s got this friend from school, they go way back, but he’s not Melanie’s sort at all. Loud, and – well, what I’d call vulgar. Tells dirty jokes; and the way he is with women . . .! Always leering, and making coarse remarks, you know. Melanie can’t stand him, but of course Scott’s fond of him, knowing him all his life – in