‘It’s quite true I’m getting rather deaf.’ He hadn’t noticed it. She had heard everything he said, in the open noisy street, and he hadn’t raised his voice. ‘I don’t always hear the bell. Doreen must have rung and I didn’t hear. That’s the only explanation.’

Was it?

‘I thought she and Harry had changed their minds about going out.’ Elsie Parrish put the cigarette to her lips between thumb and forefinger. ‘I’d give a lot,’ she said, ‘to be able to go back in time. I wouldn’t hesitate this time, I’d go round and check on Ivy whether Doreen had asked me or not.’

‘Probably your presence would have made no difference,’ he said, and then, ‘Mrs Betts had told the builders not to do any work upstairs . . .’

She interrupted him. ‘Maybe it didn’t need it. I’ve never been upstairs in Ivy’s house, so I couldn’t say. Besides, when she’d sold it the new people might have had their own ideas, mightn’t they? They might have wanted to do their own decorating.’

They were standing still now on the street corner, he about to go in one direction, she in the other. She dropped the cigarette end, stamped it out over-thoroughly with a high heel. From her handbag she took a small lacy handkerchief and dabbed her nostrils with it. The impression was that the tears, though near, would be restrained. ‘She left me two thousand pounds. Dear Ivy, she was so kind and generous. I knew I was to have something, I didn’t dream as much as that.’ Elsie Parrish smiled, a watery, girlish, rueful smile, but still he was totally unprepared for what she said next. ‘I’m going to buy a car.’

His eyebrows went up.

‘I’ve kept my licence going. I haven’t driven since my husband died and that’s twenty-two years ago. I had to sell our car and I’ve always longed and longed for another.’ She really looked as if she had, a yearning expression crumpling the roses still further. ‘I’m going to have my own dear little car!’ She was on the verge of executing a dance on the pavement. ‘And dear Ivy made that possible!’ Anxiously: ‘You don’t think I’m too old to drive?’

Wexford did, but he only said that this kind of judgement wasn’t really within his province. She nodded, smiled again, whisked off surprisingly fast into the corner supermarket. Wexford moved more slowly and thoughtfully away, his eyes down. It was because he was looking down that he saw the matchbook, and then he remembered fancying he had seen her drop something when she got out that handkerchief.

She wasn’t in the shop. She must have left by the other exit into the High Street and now she was nowhere to be seen. Deciding that matchbooks were in the category of objects which no one much minds losing, Wexford dropped it into his pocket and forgot it.

‘You want Roy?’

‘That’s right,’ said Wexford.

The foreman, storekeeper, proprietor, whatever he was, didn’t ask why. ‘You’ll find him,’ he said, ‘doing the Snowcem on them flats up the Sewingbury Road.’