It had ruined his career as a surgeon. When he’d first noticed a fine trembling in his hand, and went overseas to confirm his diagnosis, he’d resigned immediately from the medical profession – to the astonishment of everyone who knew him – and retrained as a coroner. At least, in that profession, his medical knowledge didn’t go to total waste.

So far he’d been able to keep his condition a secret from everyone around him, having travelled abroad to get properly diagnosed and treated. Nowadays, he tracked the progress of the disease himself, and self-medicated when necessary. He’d been confident that no one in his intimate circle even suspected that he might have a problem.

But now he was worried that Vincent might have begun to wonder if there was something his father was keeping from him. He was a sharp-eyed lad, and not unintelligent. And much as he loved him, Clement wished this bloody snow would stop so that his son could return to his own life, which was lived many miles away from Oxford, before …

‘I think this must be it, just ahead. I can see the constable on guard,’ Trudy’s voice interrupted the direction of his morose thoughts.

They had just approached and made the turn into Five Mile Drive, and up ahead, only a few yards on the opposite side of the road, they could just see, sticking up through a mound of snow, one angle of the rear end of a car. ‘It looks as if he turned the corner and overshot it and hit the tree,’ Trudy mused. ‘He might have hit a really bad patch of ice, perhaps?’

In front of the snowdrift was the bare trunk of a denuded cherry tree. The whole length of road was lined with them, and they looked lovely in April or May, when all the blossoms were out. Now this particular tree seemed to stand as a sad sentinel over the place where a man had lost his life, its bare twigs hanging heavily with icicles.

‘Either that, or he was going too fast for the conditions and lost control of his car,’ Clement agreed, automatically looking for a place to park, and then realising how pointless that was. The snowploughs, whilst furrowing a path through the road, had simply heaped snow at the kerbside. Instead, he just turned off the engine where they were – in the middle of the road – and opened the door. It was not as if it was likely that traffic would be queuing up any time soon. It was still relatively early on New Year’s Day. Most sensible people would still be in bed – and likely to stay there for some time to come!

‘Would he be driving fast? In this weather and the dark?’ Trudy mused.

‘Depends how much he’d had to drink.’ Clement shrugged. In his line of work, he was hardly unfamiliar with people who thought they could drink and drive.