‘No, thank you,’ Trudy said hastily, then added, more gently, ‘It’s perishing out here, and I don’t want to inconvenience you more than necessary. If you can just tell us which house belongs to Doris?’

Reluctantly, Kitty Kirk pointed out the house, then watched them as they retreated up her garden path. She continued to watch them all the way to Doris’s house, Trudy noted, and almost certainly she was still waiting and watching as they knocked on the door and got her friend out of bed.

No doubt, the moment they left the area, she’d be dressed and around Doris’s house to compare notes, Trudy mused with a wry smile.

*

The helpful Doris didn’t know the address as such, but was able to give them such an accurate description of the house, and its position on Banbury Road, that they were able to find it without much trouble. It was slightly nearer St Giles than Summertown, which put it somewhere around two miles from the scene of the crash.

It was now fully light. The house was large, whitewashed and maybe Georgian, with big wide windows and the simple, elegant dimensions that a lot of the houses in this part of the city seemed to prefer. The wide, semicircular gravel drive had obviously been cleared last night for the event, but that morning’s fresh snow was starting to lay another blanket on top of the cleared spaces.

It was clear that a few cars had been parked on the spacious driveway recently, and as they approached the impressive front door (oak, painted dark blue) Trudy was sure she could see movement in an upstairs window.

‘Somebody’s up and about,’ Clement said, indicating that he too had noticed. ‘We’re being watched, I think.’

Trudy turned around to regard the large garden, full of laurels and several other evergreens, now bowed down under the weight of snow. Clement, doing the same, murmured thoughtfully, ‘This is a long way, socially, from his own place, isn’t it? Any idea, from his identification, what he did for a living?’

‘No,’ Trudy said, then tensed as the door opened behind her.

The woman who stood on the threshold looking at them was small – not much more than five feet, Trudy gauged. She had long red hair left loose around her shoulders, and wore some sort of fancy silk black lounge pyjamas with a matching black-and-gold floating negligee thing that she now pulled tightly around her. Unlike Kitty Kirk’s warm housecoat, she doubted it gave the woman much protection from the freezing air.

But something told Trudy that this woman would rather look good and freeze, than be warm but look dowdy.

‘Yes, what on earth is it?’ the woman asked, looking at Trudy in her uniform with some trepidation.

‘I’m sorry to bother you … is it Mrs Vander?’ Trudy asked.

‘Yes, I’m Millie Vander.’