She nodded. ‘I knew what he was like, that I wouldn’t get the price from him that I’d get from a jeweller. He sold them privately. I got less than half their value but I didn’t care.’ She hunched a shoulder. ‘At least I was rid of the things.’

‘Did you kill him?’

She gazed at me, blue eyes wide with shock. ‘Of course not! Why would I?’

‘So why didn’t you tell the police that you’d been in contact with him?’ I asked. ‘You weren’t doing anything illegal, if the earrings were yours to sell.’

She hesitated, her hands fidgeting with a tissue. ‘I didn’t want the police to take my fingerprints …’

‘Well, what if they did? They can only match up prints they already have on file …’

I stopped. Verbena’s whole body was rigid, her mouth set in a line.

‘It was when I was very young,’ she muttered. ‘I was at a club in London. The police raided it for drugs. They arrested everyone. We all had our fingerprints taken. I got off with a fine.’

‘So you didn’t want the police to know that you were a teenage drugs fiend?’ I mocked her gently.

‘I didn’t want the girls to find out!’ she cried, suddenly passionate. ‘You don’t know what they’re like. They’d be vile if … And I didn’t want the whole of bloody Ashburton to know,’ she added defiantly. ‘Things get around.’

I wasn’t sure she’d told me the truth, or at least, that she’d told me all of it. Supposing the little earring deal had gone wrong, supposing she and Nick had quarrelled?

‘You don’t happen to know who bought the earrings,’ I asked her, ‘who Nick sold them to?’

She gave an impatient shrug of her shoulders. ‘I kept out of it. I think it was somebody foreign.’

‘I see. Thank you.’

She began chewing her lip anxiously. ‘Are you going to tell the police that I visited Nick?’

‘Not if you promise me that you will.’

She hesitated and then nodded reluctantly.

As I drove back down the hill, I wondered whether, armed with that heavy candlestick, she could have delivered the crushing blow that had killed Nick. She was only a slender creature. But fuelled with rage, determined to protect her reputation at all costs, I wasn’t convinced that she couldn’t.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE