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uncomfortable, a bit nervous. There was a wood fire in the grate, but the logs must have been damp because it soon fizzled into nothing and Vera made no move to revive it.
    Holly sat in her coat and nibbled at a slice of pizza. She’d refused the beer and now held a mug of instant coffee. He couldn’t see her drink from it; perhaps the mug hadn’t reached her standards of hygiene. He hadn’t really wanted alcohol, either, though he took a bottle to keep Vera company. To prove his allegiance? He still felt weird, disengaged. Two murders in a valley where nothing happened, where smart people lived. He couldn’t take it in.
    Vera was talking. She seemed to have a personality transplant when they were in the middle of an investigation. To become younger and more energetic. She stopped grizzling about her health, her itchy skin and the aches in her legs. Joe thought that Billy Cartwright knew her too well: there was something ghoulish about her passion for her work; for suspicious death and other people’s tragedies.
    ‘We have ID on the boy in the ditch. Patrick Randle. Joe, what do we know about him?’
    ‘He only registered with the house-sitting agency six months ago. He looked after a place in Devon for a month and then a flat in Hampstead.’
    Holly looked up. ‘That’s in London.’
    ‘Yes, Holly, we do know that.’ Vera was at her most imperious. A pause. ‘Do we know if Randle was offered the Carswell job just by chance? Or did he ask to come to Northumberland?’
    Joe thought Vera had a knack for making them all defensive. ‘Oh, I’m not sure. The woman I spoke to didn’t seem to know the details. The agency owners were out for the evening.’ He realized that he sounded like a schoolboy making excuses because he hadn’t done his homework. ‘But I did find out a bit more about Randle and the agency.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘The owners of the agency are a couple called Cunningham and the company’s based in Surrey. As I said, Randle had only been on their books for six months. Because the house-sitters are put into a position of trust, they’re all vetted pretty carefully. They need a CRB check, at least two references and an interview. Randle had no criminal record and he provided two good referees. One was the supervisor of his PhD and the other was the priest in the village where he’d grown up.’
    ‘Which was?’
    Joe checked his notes. ‘A place called Wychbold in Herefordshire.’
    ‘Is he still a student then?’ Vera finished the beer in her bottle and set it on the floor beside her chair.
    ‘No, he recently completed his doctorate and was taking some time out, before heading straight back to academia for postdoctoral research. A bright lad apparently.’
    ‘What subject?’ This was Holly, who seemed to be feeling left out.
    ‘Ecology.’
    ‘Family?’ Vera asked.
    ‘Mother, still living in Herefordshire. The locals have informed her of her son’s death. Randle was an only child, and his father died when he was a teenager.’
    Vera smiled at him, the closest she’d get to telling him he’d done a good job. Then she lay back in her chair and raised her eyes to the ceiling, which was nicotine-brown and hadn’t been decorated since her father, Hector, had died. Smoking was one of the few vices in which she didn’t indulge. ‘Of course it’s important that we find out if Randle asked to come to Northumberland. We need to find out if he had a specific reason for being in Gilswick, or if this was random.’
    There was a moment of silence.
    ‘Could it have been a burglary gone wrong?’ It had crossed Joe’s mind that some of those paintings downstairs in the big house might be valuable, and there could have been bits of jewellery in the master bedroom. His Sal made him watch
Antiques Roadshow
on a Sunday night and he was always astounded at the value put on stuff he wouldn’t give house-room to.
    ‘Well, that might work, if Randle’s was the body in the house and we didn’t have a