‘Who is Elsie Parrish?’

‘A very nice old friend of Mrs Wrangton’s. Nearly eighty but as spry as a cricket. And that brings me to the worst thing. June 2nd, that Friday afternoon, Mr and Mrs Betts went off to a whist drive. Mrs Parrish knew they were going. Mrs Betts had promised to knock on her door before they went so that she could come round and sit with Mrs Wrangton. She sometimes did that. It wasn’t right to leave her alone, not at her age. Well, Mrs Parrish waited in and Mrs Betts never came, so naturally she thought the Bettses had changed their minds and hadn’t gone out. But they had. They deliberately didn’t call to fetch Mrs Parrish. They left Mrs Wrangton all alone but for that young boy painter, and they’d never done such a thing before, not once.’

Wexford digested all this in silence, not liking it but not really seeing it as a possible murder case. Nurse Radcliffe seemed to have dried up. She slackened back in the chair with a sigh.

‘You mentioned an allergy . . .?’

‘Oh, my goodness, that was about fifty years ago! Only some kind of hay fever, I think. There’s asthma in the family. Mrs Betts’s brother had asthma all his life, and Mrs Betts gets urticaria – nettle rash, that is. They’re all connected, you know.’

He nodded. He had the impression she had a bombshell yet to explode, or that the volcano was about to erupt. ‘If they weren’t there,’ he said, ‘how could either of them possibly have hastened Mrs Wrangton’s end?’

‘They’d been back two hours before she died. When they came back she was in a coma, and they waited one hour and twenty minutes before they phoned Dr Moss.’

‘Would you have signed that death certificate, Len?’ said Wexford to Dr Crocker. They were in the purpose-built bungalow that housed two consulting rooms and a waiting room. Dr Crocker’s evening surgery was over, the last patient packed off with reassurance and a prescription. Crocker gave Wexford rather a defiant look.

‘Of course I would. Why not? Mrs Wrangton was ninety-two. It’s ridiculous of Radcliffe to say she didn’t expect her to die. You expect everyone of ninety-two to die and pretty soon. I hope nobody’s casting any aspersions on my extremely able partner.’

‘I’m not,’ said Wexford. ‘There’s nothing I’d like more than for this to turn out a lot of hot air. But I do have to ask you, don’t I? I do have to ask Jim Moss.’

Dr Crocker looked a little mollified. He and the chief inspector were lifelong friends, they had been at school together, had lived most of their lives in Kingsmarkham where Crocker had his practice and Wexford was head of the CID. But for a medical practitioner, no amount of friendship will excuse hints that he or one of his fellows have been negligent. And he prickled up again when Wexford said:

‘How could he know it was a stroke without a post-mortem?’