‘We’re checking her CCTV to try to establish whether she might have left the house on Saturday afternoon or evening,’ Geraldine said. ‘We might not be able to follow her journey very far once she left the house, but we could establish whether she was lying.’

‘I wonder if he bullied his wife?’ Eileen mused aloud.

Geraldine had been wondering the same thing. Anne would have found it relatively easy to drug her husband. She had the opportunity, and could easily have acquired the means. All that was missing was a motive.

‘It can’t have been easy, being married to a bully all those years,’ Geraldine suggested tentatively.

‘They were married for twenty-six years,’ Eileen said. ‘That’s a long time, but she could have snapped.’

‘Or perhaps she met someone else?’ Geraldine asked.

Eileen gave her a sharp look, and Geraldine wondered if the detective chief inspector knew about Ian’s situation. He was, after all, still technically married to Bev, who had a young baby.

‘Anne was twenty-one when Jessica was born,’ Geraldine said, forcing her attention back to Anne Armstrong. ‘So she married quite young.’

‘When she was twenty,’ Eileen replied. ‘Since then by all accounts she’s been reliant on her husband for everything. Both she and her daughter said as much. I suppose if she married at twenty, she’s never really had to look after herself. I wonder how she’s coping?’

Geraldine declined an invitation from Ariadne to go out for a drink after work that evening. She dreaded being questioned about what was going on in her own life. While she was doing her best to continue as though nothing had happened to disturb her equilibrium, she suspected her colleagues knew more about her affair with Ian than they were letting on. Several times she had caught Ariadne giving her quizzical glances and once or twice her friend had appeared to be about to say something but had then looked away in apparent confusion. For the first time in Geraldine’s life, her independence weighed her down, but the only person she could imagine sharing her home with had returned to his wife. With a sigh she forced herself to dismiss Ian from her thoughts and began reading over her notes on Jessica.

22

22

While Geraldine had been visiting the morgue and questioning David’s family, a team from the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office had been studying CCTV near David’s home, in an attempt to identify any vehicles registered to Jason or Jessica, or any other known associates of David, who might have been in the vicinity at the time of David’s death. The following morning a constable contacted Geraldine with information about a person of interest.

‘I’ve been searching for the man Anne alleged threatened her husband in the car park.’

Geraldine nodded to indicate she knew who the constable meant. ‘He said it wasn’t over, and someone was going to stop David –’