‘God give me patience! He saw her before she was dead, didn’t he? He got there about half an hour before she died. There are unmistakable signs of stroke, Reg. An experienced medical man couldn’t fail to recognize them. The patient is unconscious, the face flushed, the pulse slow, the breathing stertorous with a puffing of the cheeks during expiration. The only possible confusion is with alcoholic poisoning, but in alcoholic poisoning the pupils of the eyes are widely dilated whereas in apoplexy or stroke they’re contracted. Does that satisfy you?’

‘Well, OK, it was a stroke, but aren’t I right in thinking a stroke can be the consequence of something else, of an operation, for instance, or in the case of a young woman, of childbirth, or in an old person even of bedsores?’

‘Old Ivy Wrangton didn’t have bedsores and she hadn’t had a baby for seventy years. She had a stroke because she was ninety-two and her arteries were worn out. “The days of our age”,’ quoted the doctor solemnly, ‘“are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow.” She’d reached fourscore years and twelve and she was worn out.’ He had been pacing up and down, getting heated, but now came to sit on the edge of his desk, a favourite perch of his. ‘A damn good thing she was cremated,’ he said. ‘That puts out of court all the ghastliness of exhumation and cutting her up. She was a remarkable old woman, you know, Reg. Tough as old boots. She told me once about having her first baby. She was eighteen, out scrubbing the doorstep when she had a labour pain. Indoors she went, called her mother to fetch the midwife and lay down on her bed. The baby was born after two more pains, and the daughter came even easier.’

‘Yes, I heard there’d been another child.’ Wexford saw the absurdity of referring to someone who must necessarily be in his seventies as a child. ‘Mrs Betts has a brother?’ he corrected himself.

‘Had. He died last winter. He was an old man, Reg, and he’d been bronchial all his life. Seventy-four is old till you start comparing it with Mrs Wrangton’s age. She was so proud of her good health, boasted about never being ill. I used to drop in every three months or so as a matter of routine, and when I’d ask her how she was she’d say, I’m fine, Doctor, I’m in the pink.’

‘But I understand she’d had some illness connected with an allergy?’ Wexford was clutching at straws. ‘Nurse Radcliffe told me about it. I’ve been wondering if anything to do with that could have contributed to . . .?’

‘Of course not,’ the doctor cut in. ‘How could it? That was when she was middle-aged and the so-called illness was an asthmatic attack with some swelling of the eyes and a bit of gastric trouble. I fancy she used to exaggerate it the way healthy people do when they’re talking about the one little bit of illness they’ve ever had . . . Oh, here’s Jim. I thought I’d heard his last patient leave.’