Geraldine should have been thanking the constable for offering her a distraction from her own thoughts. She was too distressed to sleep much that night anyway. First she phoned around the traffic police and the local hospitals, but she could find no trace of David having been involved in a car accident. It was gone two o’clock by the time she finished, but she had not heard that David had turned up, so she called Anne who confirmed that her husband had still not come home. Geraldine offered to go round to the house, and Anne agreed straight away.

‘I’m just so worried,’ Anne said. ‘After everything that’s happened, do you think he might have been attacked again? This time they may not have used eggs. What if he’s been stabbed? He only went out to the car wash. Why hasn’t he come home? Something must have happened to him.’

Urging Anne to remain calm, Geraldine set off, and before long she pulled up outside the Armstrongs’ house. There were two cars parked in the drive. A quick check confirmed that one belonged to Anne, the other to David. Whatever had happened to him, he had either driven home from the car wash, or else had not left home at all. Geraldine got out of her car and closed the door gently so as not to disturb the neighbours at half past two in the morning. Walking up the drive in the faint moonlight, she almost tripped over a body lying across the path.

She had found David.

Crouching down, she could discern no vital signs. Talking on her phone before she had fully straightened up, she reported the discovery and decided to wait for the assessment team before informing Anne that her husband was lying on her doorstep, dead.

‘Do you want to request the assessment team?’ the officer on duty asked when Geraldine spoke to him.

‘Yes, the likelihood is he died from natural causes, but he’d been receiving death threats so we need to take a closer look before moving the body.’

After the hate mail and the attack on his car, there was a strong chance the councillor had been murdered.

‘I can’t see much out here because there’s very little light from the street,’ she added. ‘All I’ve got is my torch. In any case, we need a medical examiner to check him over and that can’t wait till the morning.’

‘Very well, I’ll get things in motion.’

Geraldine squatted down beside the prone figure to wait for the homicide assessment team, and within ten minutes her colleagues arrived.

‘I’ll go in and talk to the widow,’ Geraldine said.

Anne opened the door as soon as Geraldine rang the bell.

‘Thank goodness you’re here,’ she said. ‘I’ve been going out of my mind with worry.’

‘Let’s go inside where we can talk more comfortably,’ Geraldine replied quietly.