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after cubbyhole, designer after designer. In the corner beside this collection was a wooden coatrack holding a short red jacket (hers), a down-to-the-ground black wool coat (hers), and a rather worn-looking raincoat (either hers or his)-and all of them decidedly undesigner.
    The shoes, though, would cover a painter’s palette: rose red, blues that ran the gamut from cerulean to sapphire, silver straps of snakeskin, carmine straps of satin. There must have been a hundred pairs.
    “It’s an obsession, I expect you could say,” said Chris Cummins with a good-natured laugh at herself.
    David Cummins rolled his eyes. “It’s her obsession all right.”
    But it can’t be your money, thought Jury. If Mariah Cox’s one pair of Jimmy Choos had been six or seven hundred, what must this collection be worth? DS Cummins couldn’t afford this on his detective sergeant’s salary; perhaps he was independently wealthy. Or she was. That was more likely.
    Their modest cottage and its fittings were nowhere in line with Chris Cummins’s shoes. The three-piece suite in front of the tile fireplace in the living room was covered with the rather clammy feel of microsuede. The curtains at the front windows were cotton splashed about with dahlias, gray blue on blue. Stuck about like matchstick displays were specimens of old reed chairs with turned or spindle legs that might have been antiques and possibly valuable.
    That had been the front room-parlor (to the husband) or living room (to the wife). Jury detected the south of England in her speech, the north in his. Pretty far north, Newcastle north, possibly. He sounded much like Jury’s cousin by marriage, Brendan. Someone here had money, he thought.
    The shoes were in a small sitting room containing a large round table and four maple captain’s chairs. It might have doubled as a dining room, with a wall of shoes in place of a wall of wine. Jury smiled.
    “I knew it was Jimmy Choo,” she said, “without seeing the label.”
    It was hard for Jury to fault Cummins’s taking a police photograph out of the station, seeing that Chris would never wear any of these shoes to a policeman’s hip-hop, or to tea at the Ritz, or on the Eurostar to Paris. Or skiing in the Alps. Chris was in a wheelchair. In the corner of the room, where those skis might have been leaning against the wall, were crutches instead.
    She saw his look, looked herself at the crutches, and said, “I’m afraid I haven’t mastered those. But I will.” Her tone was exceptionally sad, but she quickly short-circuited this by wheeling over to the shoe collection. From her chair, she reached midway up the wall and took down a high-heeled shoe, a glittering nude-colored extravaganza, sequined and peep-toed. “Christian Louboutin. He’s my favorite designer.” It was actually quite beautiful, thought Jury.
    “See the sole?” Her forefinger tapped it. She pulled down another, this one of black suede, its vamp consisting of a twist of material running like a lattice up and above the ankle. “Red, always red,” she said. “I think that’s clever. It’s his signature-Louboutin’s.”
    “They look pretty pricey.”
    “They’re pricey all right.” She shoved back the black-and-sequined numbers and dragged out another, a jeweled slingback. “Over a thousand pounds, this one.”
    Her husband winced. “Hell, Chris, the superintendent’s going to think I’ve been on the take.”
    “What take? Is there anything around Chesham worth taking? There’s nothing to take.” As she pushed the red-soled shoe back, she sighed. “That murder is the most excitement we’ve had all the time we’ve been here.”
    “How long have you?”
    David Cummins stretched out his long legs and then pulled them quickly back. It was as if he didn’t want to call attention to his perfectly workable legs in front of his wife.
    She hadn’t noticed anyway, sitting in her wheelchair, drinking her tea.
    “Just three years. I was with uniform