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virgin.’

    Burden, that strait-laced puritan, jerked up his head. ‘Good heavens, she was an unmarried woman, wasn’t she? Things have come to a pretty pass, I must say, if a perfectly proper condition for a single woman is called abnormal.’

    ‘I suppose you must say it, Mike,’ said Wexford with a sigh, ‘but I wish you wouldn’t. I agree that a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, even twenty, such a thing wouldn’t be unusual in a woman of fifty, but it is now.’

    ‘Unusual in a woman of fifteen, if you ask me,’ said the doctor.

    ‘Look at it this way. She was only thirty when she left home, and that was just at the beginning of the stirrings of the permissive society. She had some money. Presumably, she lived alone without any kind of chaperonage. All right, she was never very attractive or charming, but she wasn’t repulsive, she wasn’t deformed. Isn’t it very strange indeed that in those first ten years at least she never had one love affair, not even one adventure for the sake of the experience?’

    ‘Frigid,’ said Crocker. ‘Everyone’s supposed to be rolling about from bed to bed these days, but you’d be surprised how many people just aren’t interested in sex. Women especially. Some of them put up a good showing, they really try, but they’d much rather be watching the TV.’

    ‘So old Acton was right, was he? “A modest woman”,’ Wexford quoted, ‘ “seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband but only to please him and, but for the desire for maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.” ‘

    Burden drained his glass and made a face like someone who had taken unpalatable medicine. He had been a policeman for longer than Rhoda Comfrey had been free of paternal ties, had seen human nature in every possible seamy or sordid aspect, yet his experience had scarcely at all altered his attitude towards sexual matters. He was still one of those people whose feelings about sex are grossly ambivalent. For him it was both dirty and holy. He had never read that quaint Victorian manual, Dr Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, male-orientated, prudish, repressive and biologically very wide of the mark, but it was for such as he that it had been written. Now, while Wexford and the doctor - who for some reason beyond his comprehension seemed to know the work well - were quoting from it with scathing laughter and casting up of eyes, he said brusquely, interrupting them:

    ‘In my opinion, this has absolutely nothing to do with Rhoda Comfrey’s murder.’

    ‘Very likely not, Mike. It seems a small point when we don’t even know where she lived or how she lived or who her friends were. But I hope all that will be solved tomorrow.’

    ‘What’s so special about tomorrow?’

    ‘I think we shall see that this rather dull little backwoods killing will have moved from the inside pages to be frontpage news. I’ve been very frank with the newspapers - mostly via Harry Wild who’ll scoop a packet in lineage - and I think I’ve given them the sort of thing they like. I’ve also given them that photograph, for what it’s worth. I’ll be very much surprised if tomorrow morning we don’t see headlines such as “Murdered Woman Led Double Life” and “What Was Stabbed Woman’s Secret?” ‘

    ‘You mean,’ said Burden, ‘that some neighbour of hers or employer or the man who delivers her milk will see it and let us know?’

    Wexford nodded. ‘Something like that. I’ve given the Press a number for anyone with information to ring. You see, that neighbour or employer may have read about her death today without its occurring to them that we’re still in ignorance of her address.’

    The doctor went off to get fresh drinks. ‘All the nuts will be on the blower,’ said Burden. ‘All the men whose wives ran away in 1956, all the paranoiacs and sensation-mongers.’

    ‘That can’t be helped. We