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she wanted. She was secretary to the editor of the Gazette and she used to write bits for them too. I told you all that only you wasn’t listening.’

    Puzzled, he said, ‘But Mrs Crown said she was in business.’

    ‘All I can say is, if you believe her you’ll believe anything. Rhoda got to be a reporter and did well for herself, had a nice home, she used to tell me, and what with the money she’d won and her wages . . .’

    He bellowed, ‘What newspaper, d’you know? Whereabouts was this home of hers?’

    Mrs Parker drew herself up, assuming a duchessy dignity. She said rather frigidly, ‘Lord knows, I hope you’ll never get to be deaf, young man. But maybe you’ll never understand unless you do. Half the things folks say to you go over your head, and you can’t keep stopping them to ask them what? Can you? They think you’re going mental. Rhoda used to say she’d written a bit here and a bit there, and gone to this place or that, and bought things for her home and whatnot, and how nice it was and what nice friends she’d got. I liked to hear her talk, I liked her being friendly with an old woman, but I know better than to think I’m like to follow half the things she said.’

    Defeated, flattened, bludgeoned and nearly stunned, Wexford got up. ‘I must go, Mrs Parker.’

    ‘I won’t quarrel with that,’ she said tartly and, showing no sign of fatigue, ‘You’ve fair worn me out, roaring at me like a blooming bull.’ She handed him the colander and the potatoes. ‘You can make yourself useful and give these to Stell. And tell her to bring me in a pie dish.’

Chapter 5
    Had she perhaps been a freelance journalist?
    At the press conference Wexford gave that afternoon he asked this question of Harry Wild, of the Kingsmarkham Courier, and of the only reporter any national newspaper had bothered to send. Neither of them had heard of her in this connection, though Harry vaguely remembered a plain featured dark girl called Comfrey, who twenty years before, had been secretary to the editor of the now defunct Gazette.

    ‘And now,’ Wexford said to Burden, ‘we’ll adjourn to the Olive for a well-earned drink. See if you can find Crocker. He’s about somewhere, dying to get the low-down on the medical report.’

    The doctor was found, and they made their way to the Olive and Dove where they sat outside at a table in the little garden. It had been the sort of summer that seldom occurs in England, the sort foreigners believe never occurs, though the Englishman of middle age can look back and truthfully assert that there have been three or four such in his lifetime. Weeks, months, of undimmed sunshine had pushed geraniums up to five feet and produced fuchsias of a size and profusion only generally seen inside a heated greenhouse. None of the three men wore a jacket, but the doctor alone sported a tee-shirt, a short-sleeved adolescent garment in which he made his rounds and entranced his female patients.

    Wexford drank white wine, very dry and as cold as the Olive was able to produce it which, tonight, was around blood heat. The occasional beer was for when Crocker, a stern medical mentor, wasn’t around. It was a while now since the chief inspector had suffered a mild thrombosis, but any excesses, as the doctor never tired of telling him, could easily lead to another. He began by congratulating his friend on the accuracy of his on-the-spot estimate of the time of death. The eminent pathologist who had conducted the post-mortem had put it at between seven and nine-thirty.

    ‘Eight-thirty’s the most probable,’ he said, ‘on her way home from the bus stop.’ He sipped his warm wine. ‘She was a strong healthy woman - until someone put a knife in her. One stab wound pierced a lung and the other the left ventricle. No signs of disease, no abnormalities. Except one. I think in these days you could call it an abnormality.'

    ‘What do you mean?’ said Crocker.

    ‘She was a