‘OK, what now?’ he asked. He tried to sound just as normal, but Trudy could sense that his old wariness around her had come back.

For a moment she wanted to curse all men for being far more trouble than they were worth. What did it matter, after all, what either one of them thought of her?

‘Now we go to the library,’ she said firmly.

‘The library?’ Vincent asked, sounding surprised and slightly disappointed. ‘Why the library?’

*

The library was situated in the town hall close to the High (as all Oxford-dwellers called the High Street) and Carfax, and not surprisingly was almost empty on a near-dark Friday afternoon in the dead of a vicious winter. Most of the city’s population was very sensibly staying indoors in such weather, and those few that had decided to venture out tended to select their reading material quickly and leave just as rapidly.

So, settled into the reference section in glorious isolation, Trudy and Vincent were able to set about their task in peaceful silence.

Trudy had explained to Vincent how vital it was that they found out more about their victim. Having questioned all the main witnesses, and with their time running out before the case was taken from them, the life and times of the dead man were becoming more important than ever. Someone had wanted to kill him, and they needed to try and get an angle on who and why.

‘And if we can find the connection between him and Phyllis Raynor, that’ll be a major breakthrough,’ Trudy had told Vincent as they left the café.

Of course, the problem with that, Trudy realised very quickly once they set to work, was Phyllis Raynor might not be a local girl, since nobody at the party seemed to know her. Indeed, if she had any past connection with the dead man, it was just as likely to have been in Tunbridge Wells (or wherever their victim was from originally). And it was unlikely that she would have done anything noteworthy enough to have earned her any recognition even within her own backyard, let alone in Oxford.

And so it proved. They could find no trace of Phyllis Raynor anywhere – not in the census, not on the voting register, and not in the newspaper archives. Trudy had deliberately given Vincent the task of trawling through the Oxford Tribune’s press cuttings for mention of any of the main players, whilst hoarding the Oxford Mail and Oxford Times to herself. She wanted no further reminders of Duncan Gillingham! But after two hours of diligent searching, the only snippets they found – not surprisingly – related to the triumphs of Katherine Morton’s artistic career, and a single mention of David O’Connor who’d won a prestigious flower arranging competition back in 1959! (Trudy’s imagination had no difficulty in supplying her with a mental imagine of the happy, gossiping, dapper ‘confirmed bachelor’ delivering a perfect posy to the impressed judges.)