At any rate, he thought, she had gone ahead without receiving it. He looked wonderingly at this grey wisp of a woman, seventy years old, who talked as if she were a fairy princess.

‘You see, she talked for years of changing her will and leaving the house to my brother. It was after he died that the nursing home business started. She quarrelled outright with Harry. Elsie Parrish was in here and Mother accused Harry in front of her of only marrying me to get this place. Harry never spoke a word to Mother again, and quite right too. I said to Mother, You’re a wicked woman, you promised me years ago I’d have this house and now you’re going back on your word. Cheats never prosper, I said.’

The daughter had inherited the mother’s tongue. Wexford could imagine the altercations, overheard by visitors, by neighbours, which had contributed to the gossip. He turned to look at the framed photograph on a mahogany tallboy. A wedding picture, circa 1903. The bride was seated, lilies in her lap under a bolster of a bosom hung with lace and pearls. The bridegroom stood behind her, frock coat, black handlebar moustache. Ivy Wrangton must have been seventeen, Wexford calculated, her face plain, puffy, young, her figure modishly pouter-pigeon-like, her hair in that most unflattering of fashions, the cottage loaf. She had been rather plump then, but thin, according to Nurse Radcliffe in old age. Wexford said quietly, apparently idly:

‘Mrs Betts, why did you send for Dr Moss on May 23rd? Your mother wasn’t ill. She hadn’t complained of feeling ill.’

She held the walking frame, pushing it backwards and forwards. ‘Why shouldn’t I? Dr Crocker was away. Elsie came in at nine and Mother was still asleep, and Elsie said it wasn’t right the amount she slept. We couldn’t wake her, though we shook her, we were so worried. I wasn’t to know she’d get up as fit as a flea ten minutes after I’d phoned for him, was I?’

‘Tell me about the day your mother died, Mrs Betts, Friday, June 2nd,’ he said, and it occurred to him that no one had yet told him anything much about that day.

‘Well . . .’ Her mouth trembled and she said quickly, ‘You don’t think Harry did anything to Mother, do you? He wouldn’t, I swear he wouldn’t.’

‘Tell me about that Friday.’

She made an effort to control herself, clenching her hands on the metal bar. ‘We wanted to go to a whist drive. Elsie came round in the morning and I said, if we went out would she sit with Mother, and she said, OK, of course she would if I’d just give her a knock before we left.’ Mrs Betts sighed and her voice steadied. ‘Elsie lives two doors down. She and Mother’d been pals for years and she always came to sit with her when we went out. Though it’s a lie,’ her old eyes flashing like young ones, ‘to say we were always out. Once in a blue moon we went out.’