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coat, her red straw hat on the arm of her chair, she sat in the living room, drinking tea. She was a big, florid-faced woman of fifty-five with bad varicose veins, her swollen feet crushed into court shoes.
    ‘Do you feel up to giving me some information, Mrs Stonor? I’m afraid this has been a bad shock for you.’
    ‘What d’you want to know?’ She spoke abruptly in a shrill, harsh voice. ‘I can’t tell you why she was in that quarry. Made a proper mess of her, didn’t he?’
    Wexford wasn’t shocked. He knew that in most people there is something sado-masochistic, and even the newly-bereaved have an apparently ghoulish need to dwell with pleasurable horror on the injuries inflicted on dead relatives. Whether or not they express these feelings depends on their degree of cultivated repression rather than on grief.
    ‘Who was “he”, Mrs Stonor?’
    She shrugged. ‘Some man. There was always some man.’
    ‘What did she do for a living?’
    ‘Waitress in a club. Place called the Townsman up in London, up West somewhere. I never went there.’ Mrs Stonor gave him a lowering, aggressive look. ‘It’s for men. The girls get themselves up in daft costumes like bathing suits with skirts, showing off all they’ve got. “Disgusting!” I said to her. “Don’t you tell me about it, I don’t want to know.” Her dad would have turned in his grave if he’d known what she did.’
    ‘She came here on Monday?’
    ‘That’s right.’ She took off her coat. He saw that she was heavily built, rigidly corseted. Her face was set in grim, peevish lines, and it was hard to tell whether it was more grim and peevish than usual. ‘You wouldn’t find a decent girl going to that quarry with a man,’ she said. ‘Had he done anything to her?’
    The question was grotesque between people who had seen for themselves, but he knew what she meant. ‘There was no sexual assault and intercourse hadn’t taken place.’
    She flushed darkly. He thought she was going to protest at his fairly blunt way of speaking but instead she rushed into an account of what he wanted to know. ‘She came down by train, the one that gets in at half past eleven. I’d got her dinner for her, a bit of steak. She liked that.’ The harsh voice wavered a little. ‘She liked her bit of steak, did Dawn. Then we chatted a bit. We hadn’t really got nothing in common any more.’
    ‘Can you tell me what you talked about?’
    ‘Nothing about
men
, if that’s what you mean. She was fed-up on account of some little kid in the train had wiped his sticky fingers down her dress. It was a new dress, one of them minis, and it showed all her legs. I said she’d have to change it and she did.’
    ‘She put on the dark red dress she was found in?’
    ‘No, she never. That wasn’t hers. I don’t know where thatcome from. There was a mauve thing she had here as I’d fetched from the cleaners for her—they call them trouser suits—and she put that on. She was wearing mauve shoes so it looked all right. Well, like I said, we chatted a bit and she went up to see her gran—that’s my mother as lives with me—and then Dawn went off to catch the four-fifteen train. Left here just before four.’
    Wexford looked thoughtful. ‘You thought she was going straight back to London?’
    ‘Of course I did. She said so. She said, “I’ve got to be in the club by seven.” She took the blue dress with her in a bag and she said she’d have to run not to miss her train.’
    ‘Two more things, Mrs Stonor, and then I’ll leave you in peace. I’d like you to describe the trouser suit, if you would.’
    ‘Very showy, it was. More like pyjamas than something you’d wear in the street. There was slacks, sort of flared, and a kind of tunic. It was mauve nylon stuff with a bit of darker mauve round the sleeves and the bottom of the tunic. Dawn liked to dress flashy.’
    ‘Have you a photograph of her?’
    Mrs Stonor gave him a suspicious glare. ‘What, got up in them