‘Do forgive me,’ said a voice, ‘but I’m a local man myself, and I happened to be in Lowestoft yesterday and someone told me they’d heard you’d come back to this part of the world to live.’

Mrs Jones looked at the barfly. Was there to be no end to this kind of thing?

‘I’ve seen you on this seat and I did wonder, and when this friend in Lowestoft told me your present name, all was made plain.’

‘I see,’ said Mrs Jones, gathering up her shopping bag.

‘I want you to know how greatly I admire his work. My father had some charming examples of it – all sold now, alas – and anyone can see that this seat was made by a craftsman compared with the others.’ Her stony face, her hostility, made him hesitate. ‘You are,’ he said, ‘who I think you are, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I am,’ said Mrs Jones crossly, another morning spoilt. ‘Arthur Sarafin was my first husband. And now I really must be on my way.’

Paintbox Place

ELDERLY LADIES AS detectives are not unknown in fiction. Avice Julian could think of two or three, the creations of celebrated authors, and no doubt there were more. It would seem that the quiet routine of an old woman’s life, her penchant for gossip and knitting and her curiosity, born of boredom, provide a suitable climate for the consideration of motive and the assessment of clues. In fiction, that is. Would it, Mrs Julian sometimes wondered, also be true in reality?

She took a personal interest. She was eighty-four years old, thin, sharp-witted, arthritic, cantankerous and intolerant. Most of her time she spent sitting in an upright chair in the bay window of her drawing room in her very large house, observing what her neighbours got up to. From the elderly ladies of mystery fiction, though, she differed in one important respect. They were spinsters, she was a widow. In fact, she had been twice married and twice widowed. Could that, she asked herself after reading a particularly apposite detective novel, be of significance? Could it affect the deductive powers and it be her spinsterhood which made Miss Marple, say, a detective of genius? Perhaps. Anthropologists say (Mrs Julian was an erudite person) that in ancient societies maidenhood was revered as having awesome and unique powers. It might be that this was true and that prolonged virginity, though in many respects disagreeable, only serves to enhance them. Possibly, one day, she would have an opportunity to put to the test the Aged Female Sleuth Theory. She saw enough from her window, sitting there knitting herself a twinset in dark blue two-ply. Mostly she eyed the block of houses opposite, on the other side of broad, tree-lined Abelard Avenue.

There were six of them, all joined together, all exactly the same. They all had three storeys, plate-glass windows, a bit of concrete to put the car on, a flowerbed, an outside cupboard to put parcels in and an outside cupboard to put the rubbish sack in. Mrs Julian thought that unhygienic. She had an old-fashioned dustbin, though she had to keep a black plastic bag inside it if she wanted Northway Borough Council to collect her rubbish.