Crocker shifted off the edge of the desk. ‘I never knew that.’

‘No? Well, it was you who told her about a new nursing home opening in Stowerton, or so she said. She told me all about it that day Mrs Betts called me when you’d gone away. Sometime at the end of May it was. She was having the house decorated for her daughter and son-in-law prior to her leaving.’

‘Did she tell you that too?’ asked Wexford.

‘No, but it was obvious. I can tell you exactly what happened during that visit if it makes you happy. That interfering harpy, Radcliffe, had just been bathing her, and when she’d dressed her she left. Thank God. I’d never met Mrs Wrangton before. There was nothing wrong with her, bar extreme old age and her blood pressure up a bit, and I was rather narked that Mrs Betts had called me out. Mrs Wrangton said her daughter got nervous when she slept late in the mornings as she’d done that day and the day before. Wasn’t to be wondered at, she said, considering she’d been sitting up in bed watching the World Cup on television till all hours. Only Mrs Betts and her husband didn’t know that and I wasn’t to tell them. Well, we had a conspiratorial laugh over that, I liked her, she was a game old dear, and then she started talking about the nursing home – what’s it called? Springfield? Sunnyside?’

‘Summerland,’ said Dr Crocker.

‘Cost you a lot, that will, I said, and she said she’d got a good bit coming in which would die with her anyway. I assumed she meant an annuity. We talked for about five minutes and I got the impression she’d been tossing around this nursing home idea for months. I asked her what her daughter thought and she said . . .’

‘Yes?’ prompted Wexford.

‘Oh, my God, people like you make one see sinister nuances in the most innocent remarks. It’s just that she said, You’d reckon Doreen’d be only too glad to see the back of me, wouldn’t you? I mean, it rather implied she wouldn’t be glad. I don’t know what she was inferring and I didn’t ask. But you can rest assured Mrs Betts had no motive for killing her mother. Leaving sentiment apart, it was all the same to her whether her mother was alive or dead. The Bettses would still have got the house and after her death Mrs Wrangton’s capital. The next time I saw her she was unconscious, she was dying. She did die, at seven-thirty, on June 2nd.’

Both Wexford’s parents had died before he was forty. His wife’s mother had been dead twenty years, her father fifteen. None of these people had been beyond their seventies, so therefore Wexford had no personal experience of the geriatric problem. It seemed to him that for a woman like Mrs Wrangton, to end one’s days in a nursing home with companionship and good nursing and in pleasant surroundings was not so bad a fate. And an obvious blessing to the daughter and son-in-law whose affection for a parent might be renewed when they only encountered her for an hour or so a week. No, Doreen Betts and her husband had no motive for helping Mrs Wrangton out of this world, for by retiring to Summerland she wouldn’t even make inroads into that three or four thousand pounds of capital. Her pension and her annuity would cover the fees. Wexford wondered what those fees would be, and remembered vaguely from a few years back hearing a figure of twenty pounds a week mentioned in a similar connection. Somebody’s old aunt, some friend of his wife. You’d have to allow for inflation, of course, but surely it would cost no more than thirty pounds a week now. With the Retirement Pension at eighteen pounds and the annuity worth, say, another twenty, Mrs Wrangton could amply have afforded Summerland.