“Well, she wouldn’t have been as it happens. She’d taken the kids round to her mother’s so they wouldn’t catch it too. So she’d have been round there, giving them their tea. She probably wouldn’t have been home till about eight o’clock. No, my alibi was the ’flu. It was that epidemic that went round. You must have written the ‘Killer ’Flu Bug’ stories. I could hardly walk to the toilet, never mind strangle anybody.” Jimmy had finally got his pipe going, and he visibly relaxed as his head was engulfed in a cloud of blue, aromatic smoke.

Lindsay chuckled. “I can beat that, Jimmy. I was in Italy at the time.”

“On holiday, were you?”

“No, I was working over there.”

He grinned. “All right for some. Christ, you wouldn’t catch me coming back here if I could get a job over there. A bottle of wine and a place in the sunshine, eh? What more could anybody ask for?”

Lindsay was content to let the conversation slip into more general channels now she had the information she wanted. When she finished her drink, she glanced at her watch and said, “I’d better be off. I’ve got to meet a punter in ten minutes. It was nice bumping into you, Jimmy. All the best with the new job.”

“Thanks, Lindsay. If you see any of the boys from the Clarion, tell them I was asking for them.”

Lindsay drove back down the motorway, thinking over what Jimmy had told her. It would have been easy enough to exaggerate his illness for the benefit of his wife and the doctor. But how would he have known he would find Alison alone, unless they were still on good enough terms for him to have made an arrangement to see her? And why kill her then? The crisis was over and he was clearly getting his life back together again, even if the Motherwell Tribune sports desk wasn’t as well paid or prestigious as the Daily Clarion. Still, he’d said himself that while she was alive he’d had to live with the constant edge of fear that one day she might extract a crueler revenge. And all that displacement activity with his pipe could have disguised a multitude of emotions. No, she couldn’t write Jimmy off just yet.

She glanced at the dashboard clock. Just after three. She should drop in at Claire’s on the way back. Lindsay would have dearly loved to put off so potentially awkward an encounter, but she knew it would have to be faced sooner or later. Better sooner.