‘Mother would never have done it. I know she wouldn’t, it was all bluff with her. Even Mother wouldn’t have been that cruel.’

Her husband pulled his moustache, slowly shuffling his slippered feet back and forth. His angry excitement had resulted in a drop of water appearing on the end of his nose. It hung there, trembling.

Doreen Betts said, ‘I knew she didn’t meant to go ahead with it when I said, Can I tell the builders to leave the upstairs? And she said, I daresay. That’s what she said. I daresay, she said, I’m not bothered either way. Of course she wouldn’t have gone ahead with it. You don’t even get a room to yourself in that place. Ninety-five pounds a week! They’ll put you to bed at eight o’clock, Mother, I said, so don’t think they’ll let you sit up till all hours watching TV.’

‘Quite right,’ said Harry Betts ambiguously.

‘Why, if we’d known Mother meant to do a thing like that, we could have lived in Harry’s flat when we got married. He had a nice little flat over the freezer centre in the High Street. It wasn’t just one room like Mother went about saying, it was a proper flat, wasn’t it, Harry? What’d we have done if Mother’d done a thing like that? We’d have had nowhere.’ Her husband’s head-shaking, the trembling droplet, the fidgety feet, seemed suddenly to unnerve her. She said to him, distress in her voice, ‘I’m going to have a little talk to the officer on my own, dear.’

Wexford followed her into the room where Mrs Wrangton had slept for the last years of her life. It was on the ground floor at the back, presumably originally designated as a dining room, with a pair of windows looking out on to a long narrow concrete terrace and a very long, very narrow garden. No re-decorations had been carried out here. The walls were papered in a pattern of faded nasturtiums, the woodwork grained to look like walnut. Mrs Wrangton’s double bed was still there, the mattress uncovered, a pile of folded blankets on top of it. There was a television set in this room as well as in the front room, and it had been placed so that the occupant of the bed could watch it.

‘Mother came to sleep down here a few years back,’ said Mrs Betts. ‘There’s a toilet just down the passage. She couldn’t manage the stairs any more except when nurse helped her.’ She sat on the edge of the mattress, nervously fingering a cage-like object of metal bars. ‘I’ll have to see about her walking frame going back, I’ll have to get on to the welfare people.’ Her hands resting on it, she said dolefully, ‘Mother hated Harry. She always said he wasn’t good enough for me. She did everything she could to stop me marrying him.’ Mrs Betts’s voice took on a rebellious girlish note. ‘I think it’s awful having to ask your mother’s consent to marry when you’re sixty-five, don’t you?’