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it all.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ shemurmured. ‘I just don’t know what I’m doing. I just don’t kno—’
    ‘Mrs Robinson, I wonder if I might have another word,’ said the detective, who had arrived at the other side of the bed in time to see and hear all this.
    Half an hour later the detective sergeant was on the phone to his inspector. ‘I’ve had another chat with Mrs Robinson, sir.’
    Inspector Foster listened intently as Bannister related Lily’s story. ‘Did you find any contradictions in her version of events?’
    ‘None, sir. It all sounds plausible until you realise that the house didn’t belong to the Oldroyds – if that’s their real name.’
    ‘Or even if the Oldroyds exist?’
    ‘Quite, sir.’
    ‘Did you ask her why she went out to Grassington to get her boy back just two days later?’
    ‘I did, sir. It seems the Oldroyds had told her that the Germans intended bombing Leeds any time now and that the boy would be safer out in the country. The next day she heard that no such bombing was going to happen so she rang the number Oldroyd had given her and was told by the operator that no such number existed so she went out there on the bus.’
    ‘She’s certainly got a good story going, Sergeant – too good, you might think.’
    ‘On the face of it she sounds very plausible, sir, but one odd thing did happen in the hospital. A nurse gave her a St Christopher medal, with her calling her baby Christopher. Mrs Robinson took the medal and squeezed it so tightly that her hand bled. She didn’t know she was doing it, sir. The wound looked very painful and required dressing.’
    ‘And she didn’t knowshe was doing it? Would you say that was unbalanced behaviour, Sergeant?’
    ‘Possibly, sir.’
    ‘Yes. Well, I think we need to tread very carefully here, Sergeant. Firstly we need to take a good look around her house. I’ll arrange it.’
    ‘How do we enter, sir? The old-fashioned way, or do we politely ask her for her key?’
    ‘I think the less she knows the better at this stage, John. I suggest we engage the services of a locksmith.’
    ‘Are we allowed to do that, sir?’
    ‘Yes, if we have grounds for suspicion of a crime having been committed. I do not want a repeat of what happened last year.’
    ‘No, sir.’
    Bannister put the phone down and thought about the event to which his boss had been referring. The parallels to this case were too much to ignore. They’d been called to a house in Harehills in Leeds at two o’clock in the morning. A young woman had staggered out into the street shouting for help. She was holding her five-month-old baby girl and screaming that she’d been attacked in her home and her baby was dead, strangled by the attacker.
    It was a most odd case, seemingly motiveless. The woman hadn’t been sexually assaulted and nothing had been stolen. In fact she lived in a poor area where the pickings for any robber would be very slim indeed. Apparently the killer had come in through an unlocked door, gone up the stairs, strangled the baby and thrown the woman down the stairs. She was taken to hospital with several broken ribs. There were no clues whatsoever as to who had done this. Foster had been a chief inspector back then. The detective inspector in charge of the case had decided the woman, who’d had a recent history of depression due to her husband being killed in France, was the main suspect and had ordered for her to be taken into custody once she’d been discharged from hospital. He accused her of strangling the child herself then throwing herself down the stairs. The woman vehemently denied this.
    Chief Inspector Fosterlooked at the evidence, all of it circumstantial. He also took into consideration the implications if the woman had been wrongly charged, which he thought was quite probable. The police were already getting atrocious publicity for locking up this poor woman. Her friends and neighbours had begun a protest, keeping a vigil outside the police