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second corpse.’ This time Vera made him feel like the stupid kid at the back of the class. ‘Besides, I didn’t get the feel that anything had been taken, and there was no sign of a break-in.’
    Holly shot Joe one of her superior looks.
    There was a moment’s pause.
    ‘Do we know anything about the older man?’ Vera asked at last. ‘The man in the flat. Anything from the second CSI team, Joe? Holly didn’t find anything in the pockets that she could get to easily.’
    ‘Still no ID,’ Joe said. ‘They’ve taken fingerprints, but there’s no match yet. And when I left the station there’d been no missing-person report that could have been him.’ He was starting to think of the older victim as the ‘grey man’ now too. Grey and almost invisible.
    ‘And no information on how he actually got to the house?’ Absent-mindedly Vera reached out for another beer.
    ‘No, but we haven’t canvassed the neighbours yet.’ By the time they’d got a team together, most of the villagers would be in bed.
    ‘That’s a priority for the morning then. Let’s talk to Percy Douglas and his daughter again. Then apparently there are some fancy barn conversions at the end of the lane. The victim wouldn’t have passed them to get to the big house, but the residents might have been out and about this afternoon.’
    ‘It couldn’t have been a murder followed by suicide?’ Holly was tentative, worried about being shouted down.
    ‘You mean Randle killed the older man, then himself?’ Vera didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, but she sounded sceptical. ‘Have we got a cause of death for Randle yet, Joe? Dr Keating was at that locus first.’
    ‘He says they’ll do both autopsies first thing tomorrow; after working two scenes he needs a break and doesn’t want to start tonight. He’ll bring in a colleague to help, but he’ll supervise both. He’ll move on to the grey man once they’ve completed the forensic capture on Randle.’ Joe paused for a moment. ‘He said he’d go for a seven o’clock start. He hasn’t got much on just now, so the place will be quiet.’
    ‘Did he tell you how Randle died?’ Vera sounded impatient. Joe thought that, unlike the pathologist,
she
wouldn’t need a break. If she had her way, they’d be in the mortuary now, working through the night. ‘Keating must have some idea! Was he stabbed, like the older man? I couldn’t tell from the top of the bank. If he
was
stabbed, it must have been in the back, because there was no disturbance to the front of the clothes. And it looked to me as if he was placed under the cow parsley. I can’t see how he could have done that himself.’
    ‘A double-killing then?’ Joe stretched. He supposed this would mean big-style overtime. Sal liked the extra money, but not the fact that he wouldn’t see the bairns awake until all this was over.
    ‘Though Hol found a knife in the pond at the big house.’ Vera ignored him and continued her train of thought. She was like a tank when she got going. Relentless. Nothing would stop her. ‘If we assume that it was the murder weapon and that Randle was stabbed too, it makes sense that the young man was killed somewhere near the house. Otherwise the killer would have had to go back to the house to chuck the knife in the pool. Joe, will you organize a proper search of the garden tomorrow. The big cheeses won’t make a fuss about resources, not with two deaths and the press going ape.’
    Joe could tell her mind was sparking and fizzing and she was still considering the possibilities. He thought she would probably be up all night, working through multiple scenarios. He hoped Keating had switched off his phone; otherwise he’d get no rest, either. She’d pick at every thread until one led to real information.
    ‘But the only blood in the flat or the rest of the house was under the older man, so we definitely need the search team in for the garden. I can’t see that Randle was killed
in
the flat.’ Vera