‘Mr Terrence Parker was the man who sold your daughter that car, wasn’t he?’ Trudy said gently. Yet again, she already knew the answer. Before leaving Clement’s house, and after explaining her suspicions about this woman to both men, she’d rung Geoffrey Thorpe. Luckily he’d been in his office, and still feeling thoroughly cowed, had been more than anxious to help. A quick rifle through the appropriate files had soon provided the positive answer that she’d been expecting.

‘Yes, the bastard sold her the car,’ Katherine heard herself say. It sounded as if her voice was coming from a long way off. ‘He must have seen how young she was. He must have known from taking down her details that she couldn’t long have taken her driving test. And he knew cars, damn him. He knew that sporty little bit of fluff of nonsense would be too much for any inexperienced teenager to handle. And it was so flimsy – all light and airy and built for speed. It crumpled like tissue paper when it hit that lorry,’ she added horrifically. ‘Amy Jean had no chance,’ she concluded flatly.

She regarded her glass and took another hearty swig. She wished she could get blind drunk and just forget, just for a few hours … But it was odd. Nowadays, no matter how much she drank, she never seemed quite able to lose touch with reality anymore.

‘Did you know he’d be at the party?’ Trudy asked quietly, hardly daring to move in case she distracted the older woman or gave her pause to rethink what she was doing.

‘What? Oh, that stupid little New Year’s Eve bash? No, I had no idea,’ Katherine said, and Trudy believed her. ‘I’d met Millie Vander vaguely out and about, as you do. This is a small city, after all, and she was something on an arts council or some such thing. But she wasn’t exactly my “type”. A repressed society matron, with plenty of money but probably bored out of her skull, poor cow,’ Katherine said, with what sounded to Trudy and Clement like genuine sympathy in her voice.

She sighed heavily and took another, more thoughtful sip of vodka. ‘No, it’s like I said. I had a whole stack of invitations to various parties, but because the weather was so bloody awful and hers was the only party within easy walking distance, I ended up going there.’