He was still feeling shaken though, as he stood behind her after she’d rung the doorbell. Not because of the fall – which probably hadn’t even caused him more than a few bruises. But because of the reason for it.

For there was no longer any getting around it.

He was becoming unsteady on his feet.

He was so lost in anxiety over this thought, that it wasn’t until he heard the sound of voices that he realised the doorbell’s summons had been answered, and he forced himself to concentrate on the matter in hand.

But at some point in the not too distant future, he knew there would have to be a reckoning, and that hard choices awaited him.

Chapter 16

David O’Connor looked surprised but not displeased to see a policewoman and an attractive if unknown man on his doorstep, and invited them in out of the cold immediately. He began to look really animated, however, when it became clear that they wanted to discuss the New Year’s Eve party he’d attended, and the fatal car accident that had subsequently followed it.

In his mid-fifties, plump, balding, with deep-set dark-blue eyes, he was meticulously dressed in trousers and silk waistcoat, with a dark-red smoking jacket unbuttoned over the ensemble. He happily admitted to being a perennial bachelor, and thus was often invited to many parties to ‘make up’ the male numbers.

He showed them into a very warm, very cosy snug in his small, but very well decorated home, and bustled about settling them down in chairs and offering them mulled wine and mince pies that he promised them earnestly he’d baked himself.

It took Trudy a little while to break through all the bonhomie and chatter, and steer the flow of talk onto more lucrative topics.

‘So you and Mrs Vander are old friends?’ she offered as an opening gambit.

‘Oh my, yes! Well, I was friends first with her late husband, of course, but Millie is such a dear too. Such a shame George went so suddenly like he did. He was a real gentleman. Not too many of us around nowadays, let me tell you. Would you like some brandy butter with the pies? I have some in the pantry.’

‘No thank you, these are delicious just as they are,’ Trudy assured him, and took another obliging bite out of the pastry offering, which was, in fact, very nice indeed. Clement, seated by the fire, was already absently munching on his second pie, and looked, to Trudy’s eye, just a little distracted.

Although he sometimes took charge if their witness was a man around his own age – since they often responded more fully to him than to herself – this time he seemed happy enough for her to take the lead in the questioning. Perhaps he just didn’t care for their witness’s over-effusive ways?