‘I think you had,’ said Wexford.

‘The facts,’ Burden began, very like a Prosecuting Counsel, ‘are as follows. Axel Kingman is thirty-five years old and he keeps a health-food shop here in the High Street called Harvest Home. Know it?’ When Wexford signified by a nod that he did, Burden went on, ‘He used to be a teacher in Myringham, and for about seven years before he came here he’d been living with a woman named Corinne Last. He left her, gave up his job, put all the capital he had into this shop, and married a Mrs Hannah Nicholson.’

‘He’s some sort of food freak, I take it,’ said Wexford.

Burden wrinkled his nose. ‘Lot of affected nonsense,’ he said. ‘Have you ever noticed what thin pale weeds these health-food people are? While the folks who live on roast beef and suet and whisky and plum cake are full of beans and rarin’ to go.’

‘Is Kingman a thin pale weed?’

‘A feeble – what’s the word? – aesthete, if you ask me. Anyway, he and Hannah opened this shop and took a flat in the high-rise tower our planning geniuses have been pleased to raise over the top of it. The fifth floor. Corinne Last, according to her and according to Kingman, accepted the situation after a while and they all remained friends.’

‘Tell me about them,’ Wexford said. ‘Leave the facts for a bit and tell me about them.’

Burden never found this easy. He was inclined to describe people as ‘just ordinary’ or ‘just like anyone else’, a negative attitude which exasperated Wexford. So he made an effort. ‘Kingman looks the sort who wouldn’t hurt a fly. The fact is, I’d apply the word gentle to him if I wasn’t coming round to thinking he’s a cold-blooded wife-killer. He’s a total abstainer with a bee in his bonnet about drink. His father went bankrupt and finally died of alcoholism, and our Kingman is an anti-booze fanatic.

‘The dead woman was twenty-nine. Her first husband left her after six months of marriage and went off with some girl friend of hers. Hannah went back to live with her parents and had a part-time job helping with the meals at the school where Kingman was a teacher. That was where they met.’

‘And the other woman?’ said Wexford.

Burden’s face took on a repressive expression. Sex outside marriage, however sanctioned by custom and general approval, was always distasteful to him. That, in the course of his work, he almost daily came across illicit sex had done nothing to mitigate his disapproval. As Wexford sometimes derisively put it, you would think that in Burden’s eyes all the suffering in the world, and certainly all the crime, somehow derived from men and women going to bed together outside the bonds of wedlock. ‘God knows why he didn’t marry her,’ Burden now said. ‘Personally I think things were a lot better in the days when education authorities put their foot down about immorality among teachers.’