He felt strangely that there was a time limit to his involvement with the case. Once the pathologist had completed the postmortem and the test results were returned from the lab he would be forced to leave it all to the police. He wondered why it was so important for him to succeed. Was it, as Molly sometimes said, despicable male pride? Or the need to prove to himself that although he had retired he was still competent? He was ashamed of his need for recognition. There was something squalid in this scrabbling through a dead woman’s clothes to get ahead of the police.

He wished he could be as relaxed and secure in his own abilities as Molly. But fear of failure and a relentless curiosity drove him on. He switched off the light in Ursula’s bedroom and they walked together down the stairs.

The living room was freezing. There was already a sheen of frost over the window pane and Molly grumbled, monotonously and under her breath, that this was all a waste of time. She had no hope of persuading George to give up.

The room was dusty but ordered, obviously scarcely used. There was a book case with a glass door full of unread Dickens and Thackeray, and large and uncomfortable furniture. Why had she died here? George wondered. What had she been doing? Surely she would have spent the evening in the kitchen where at least it was warm. Had she been trying to reach the phone? Why, then, had she been found lying on the sofa?

‘When did Ursula use this room?’ he asked.

‘Whenever she had visitors,’ Molly said. ‘She thought the state of the kitchen would offend people.’

‘So if she had a visitor on Friday night she would have brought them in here,’ George said. ‘It’s another confirmation of our theory.’

He prowled around the room, opening sideboard drawers to find nothing but a tray of tarnished silver and a pile of old photographs. He ran his hand between the cushions on the sofa and brought out ten pence in small change and a pensioner’s bus pass in Fred Ottway’s name. Frustrated, he stopped in front of a watercolour drawing of a house, built of local stone with tall gables, surrounded by trees.

‘Where’s that?’ he asked.

‘It’s called Monk’s Wood. The only close friend Ursula ever had in the valley used to live there. She was a widow called Kathleen Prime, a lovely woman. She did the painting herself. She died fifteen or sixteen years ago.’

‘Who lives there now?’

‘Her great-niece, Alex,’ Molly paused. ‘Joanna went to stay there, I think after she’d been ill.’