Her witness looked at her, eyeing her uniform, and then gave a pixie-like smile of pure impish mischief. ‘Oh no, officer, I can’t say that he did. Oh, he’d had one or two drinkies I’m sure, but he was hardly staggering! Scout’s honour. He was perfectly fit to drive, as I was myself,’ he swore piously.

‘And you didn’t notice anything unusual about him then?’

‘No. Oh, wait a minute … But that might be nothing. I wasn’t sure …’ Clearly he wanted her to tease the titbit out of him, and Trudy, smothering a slightly irritated sigh, obliged him.

‘I really would be happy to hear anything you may have noticed, sir. We are dealing with a fatality,’ she reminded him, further massaging his ego and sense of self-importance by adding solemnly, ‘and you may have been the last person to actually see Mr Parker alive.’

David O’Connor’s plump lips formed a perfect ‘O’ at this, and he nodded, going perhaps just a little pale. ‘Oh my! Yes … Well, like I said, I may have been mistaken. It was dark, you must remember, and I only caught a flash, as he backed the car out and swept it around in readiness to go through the Vanders’ double gates … But I thought I saw a flash of brightness in the car with him.’

Whatever either Trudy or Clement had thought he might say, it certainly hadn’t been that.

‘A brightness?’ Trudy echoed flatly. ‘Do you mean … someone had a torch on inside?’

‘Oh no, sorry, I’m not being clear, am I? Dear me! No, I meant that I thought I saw, for a moment or two, a paler, brighter colour in the car with him, where there shouldn’t have been any such thing. As if someone with light hair was sitting beside him – perhaps a blonde, or an older woman with white hair, maybe. The young Lochinvar had dark hair, you see,’ he said helpfully, looking from one to the other of them, delighted with himself and the stir this latest revelation was having on his visitors.

‘He had a passenger with him?’ Trudy gasped.

‘As I said, I couldn’t be sure,’ David hedged carefully once again. ‘But if I were a betting man, I’d have said he wasn’t alone when he drove away that night.’

Chapter 17

‘What sort of things does she paint?’ Trudy asked warily some twenty minutes later, as they pulled up outside the home of the feted artist Katherine Amy Morton. She didn’t understand ‘art’ but she knew that the coroner did, and often purchased new canvases for his home.