‘Uniforms have been sent to every contact given to us by Fred O’Reilly. There are currently twelve active members who meet in the village hall. I have a list and their statements taken late last night. All twelve members were interviewed and all pretty much said the same to the uniforms conducting the inquiries.’

‘What sort of a group is it?’

‘They said they meet to play cards, paint, birdwatch and make crafts.’

‘Cute. Demographics?’

‘Oldest: eighty-six-year-old male, youngest is a twenty-three-year-old female. No anomalies reported, no red flags. All dates corroborated and all have alibis that checked out.’

‘Good. Right. Here we are. Let’s go and meet Fred and Sandra, and see if we can get to know Mary a bit better, shall we?’

Kelly parked on the quiet lane outside the stone cottage, flanked by tall bushes on all sides. Birds flitted between branches and late summer flowers bloomed unashamedly in the pretty garden. The house looked as though it had been lived in and loved for many years. The paths were well tended and clean, and the fences freshly painted. Kelly noticed also that the windows were not sparkling clean, something her mother always told her to look out for: never fully trust a woman with an immaculate house. Since Wendy had died, Kelly found herself thinking more about the snippets of wisdom that her mother had passed down, only to be ignored at the time and consigned to a forgotten chamber of irrelevance, until she was gone and could no longer speak.

They knocked on the door and a woman answered. Her face held a look of concern as well as wariness. Kelly figured that the woman was Sandra O’Reilly.

‘Good morning. Is it Mrs O’Reilly?’ Kelly spoke first.

The woman didn’t answer straight away. She looked between the two strangers and held on to her door, contemplating closing it.

‘Are you from the paper?’ the woman spoke.

‘No. We’re police detectives, Mrs O’Reilly. We’re here to see your husband. I believe the preliminary responders told you we’d be coming? We need to ask you both some questions about Mary Hales. I know you’ve been over so much already. If we could come in, I can explain.’ She showed her ID tag and Rob did the same.

‘This is Detective Constable Shawcross, and I’m Detective Inspector Porter,’ Kelly said.

The woman appeared relieved and Kelly took this as a good sign. She let go her grip of the door slightly and a faint smile appeared at the corners of her mouth.

‘I am Sandra O’Reilly. I thought it was the paper. We’ve had a few journalists around here. One young woman was very pushy. I think they’ve gone now: bored with it all. I have no idea where they got the information from that Mary was our friend. I suppose they can get hold of anything now.’