Wexford drove up there. Roy was a gigantic youth, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, with an aureole of thick curly fair hair. He came down the ladder and said he’d just been about to knock off for his tea break, anyway. There was a carmen’s café conveniently near. Roy lit a cigarette, put his elbows on the table.

‘I never knew a thing about it till I turned up there the next day.’

‘But surely when Mrs Betts came in the afternoon before she asked you how her mother had been?’

‘Sure she did. And I said the truth, that the old lady’d got a headache and asked for something for it and I’d given it her, and then she’d felt tired and gone in for a lay-down. But there was no sign she was dying. My God, that’d never have crossed my mind.’

A headache, Wexford reflected, was often one of the premonitory signs of a cerebral haemorrhage. Roy seemed to read his thoughts, for he said quickly:

‘She’d had a good many headaches while I was in the place working. Them non-drip plastic-based paints have got a bit of a smell to them, used to turn me up at first. I mean, you don’t want to get thinking there was anything out of the way in her having an aspirin and laying down, guv. That’d happened two or three times while I was there. And she’d shovel them aspirins down, swallow four as soon as look at you.’

Wexford said, ‘Tell me about that afternoon. Did anyone come into the house between the time Mr and Mrs Betts went out and the time they got back?’

Roy shook his head. ‘Definitely not, and I’d have known. I was working on the hall, see? The front door was wide open on account of the smell. Nobody could have come in there without my seeing, could they? The other old girl – Mrs Betts, that is – she locked the back door before she went out and I hadn’t no call to unlock it. What else d’you want to know, guv?’

‘Exactly what happened, what you and Mrs Wrangton talked about, the lot.’

Roy swigged his tea, lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. ‘I got on OK with her, you know. I reckon she reminded me of my gran. It’s a funny thing, but everyone got on OK with her bar her own daughter and the old man. Funny old git, isn’t he? Gave me the creeps. Well, to what you’re asking, I don’t know that we talked much. I was painting, you see, and the door to the front room was shut. I looked in a couple of times. She was sitting there knitting, watching cricket on the TV. I do remember she said I was making a nice job of the house and it was a pity she wouldn’t be there to enjoy it. Well, I thought she meant she’d be dead, you know the way they talk, and I said, Now come on, Mrs Wrangton, you mustn’t talk like that. That made her laugh. She said, I don’t mean that, you naughty boy, I mean I’m going into a nursing home and I’ve got to sell the place, didn’t you know? No, I said, I didn’t, but I reckoned it’d fetch a packet, big old house like that, twenty thousand at least, I said, and she said she hoped so.’