It was Morris and Ricky who’d found me. They’d called in at the shop to see how I was getting on, discovered me collapsed in a groggy heap on the kitchen floor and phoned for police and ambulance. We’d already been through the whole farrago of flashing blue lights and screaming sirens before the inspector had arrived.

‘Are you telling me,’ I asked Ricky, aghast, ‘that everyone in Ashburton thinks I murdered Nick?’

‘Well, not everyone,’ he replied, looking uncomfortable.

‘Not anyone who knows you, obviously,’ Morris assured me, blushing slightly.

I glared at the pair of them. I could just imagine the gossip they’d been indulging in. ‘Fantastic,’ I muttered.

The inspector cleared his throat, returning us to the matter in hand. ‘We shall also be interviewing Mrs Verbena Clarke.’

I folded my arms and grunted. I bet her tongue had been wagging too. So, she hadn’t come forward voluntarily? That wasn’t going to look good, I thought with satisfaction.

Inspector Ford took his stare off me and gazed at the horrid rag that had been squashed over my face, now screwed up on Nick’s kitchen table. It was one of his old polishing rags.

‘We’ll get this analysed, but it’s undoubtedly ether.’ He slipped it into a plastic bag and handed it to DeVille. ‘That would have rendered you unconscious very quickly.’

‘There’s a bottle on the table in the living room,’ I told him. ‘Nick used it as a solvent.’

The inspector shook his head in despair. ‘It’s a highly volatile and flammable substance. It shouldn’t be stored in the home, and certainly not with other cleaning and chemical substances. You should get any bottles like that properly disposed of, Miss Browne.’

‘But where’s the bottle now, Inspector?’ Morris piped up.

‘It seems that whoever attacked Miss Browne took it with him, probably because his fingerprints were on it,’ the inspector answered. ‘However, his methods do reveal certain things about him.’

‘Like what?’ Ricky asked.

The inspector hesitated. I’d asked, when he’d arrived, if Ricky and Morris could stay, but it was clear that whilst he tolerated their presence, he would have preferred not to have them in the room. ‘If he was the sort of thug who’d wanted to do you serious harm, he could have done so. But his use of ether indicates his objective was escape.’

‘Which seems to bring us back to Richard,’ I said gloomily.

‘Or an opportunist thief,’ the inspector said. A smile glimmered briefly. ‘That is the most likely culprit, you know – a passing opportunist.’

‘But there’s nothing in here to steal,’ Ricky objected, ‘except a lot of crappy second-hand furniture.’

‘Thieves will steal anything, anything they can sell, especially if they’re desperate for drugs money,’ he answered. ‘And even Ashburton is not immune from these problems.’

‘Do we know how he got in?’ Morris asked.