Gorrie didn’t have children himself, and he guessed he ran toward overromanticizing the connection between mother and child, tending to view it wrapped in tender rose petals though he had ample evidence from his work to tell him different. It was on exactly this sort of matter that he missed his former detective sergeant and sometime partner most acutely. Nessa Lear had a fine compass for reality. Gorrie liked to say he’d raised her from a pup, picked her from the pool of detective constables and made her into a true solver of crimes. But he’d done too good a job—Nessa had been snatched away for a job with Interpol some months back. Never mind that she had asked for the job herself for several years—to Gorrie’s mind she had been wrestled from him, and the loss hurt all the more as no replacement had been forthcoming due to “budgetary considerations.”

The deputy area commander, Nab Russell, had promised a successor in the hazy distant future. For the meantime, DI Gorrie and the rest of CID were expected to make do by using “pooled resources”—Russell’s personal euphemism for the detective constables. An eager bunch, mostly overworked, in several cases very rough about the edges, they were good at running down the odd leads, but not for bouncing ideas with, as he had often done with DS Lear.

Nessa would have been excellent probing the neighbors, much better than DC Andrews, whose monotone voice tended to make him sound more like a footballer than a policeman. He’d been too quick with the interviews; Gorrie had to take him by the hand.

Did Claire strike you as a killer?

No, sir.

Good enough then.

No, detective, we do it like this:

Had Mrs. Mackay seemed depressed? Drawn out? At the end of her wits, would you say? Was she an angry person? More frustrated than normal?

No matter the phrasing, no was always the answer. Oh, she could yell at Eddie, put him in his place. But murder him? Should have maybe, but until it happened not a one of her friends or family would have predicted it. She had not seemed to suffer postpartum depression; she’d gained her shape back after the birth with a mum-and-child program, where the instructor—a looker herself—said she had a special closeness with the child. Her sister said that she had worked at a bank as a teller but had no plans to go back; it wasn’t the sort of job you’d worry into a career.