‘Not him,’ said Dain with a laugh. ‘Well, his name was over the door, but running a pub would be too much like hard work for that drunken old bastard. No, you’d have found him sitting on that side of the bar most nights. He knew everyone around here, though. If strangers came in, he’d be giving them the once-over as they walked to the bar, and he’d know everything about them by the time they left the pub again. You could do with blokes like my old dad on the police force, if you want information.’

‘I suppose he’s not still around,’ said Fry.

‘Well, not around here, thank God,’ said Dain. ‘We put him in a home when he got too bad. Cracked as a tin bucket he was, by the end. Too much drink wrecked his brain. But it was his liver that did for him in the end.’

‘Oh.’

‘Me, I won’t go that way. I’m as fit as a fiddle, and twice as tuneful.’

Dain rubbed a hand on the bar counter, as if finding a blemish on the polished wood.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘I think the police did use my dad as a source of information from time to time. The local bobby would come in here himself in those days, in uniform and all. And he’d expect free drinks. Those were different times, I suppose. He even brought his sergeant in sometimes.’

Picturing the scene, Fry suddenly had a bad feeling about the answer to her next question. ‘Can you remember the name of that sergeant?’

Dain shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s too long ago.’

‘Shame.’

Dain ran a cloth across the bar counter. ‘Wait, though … it was a fairly common name. Oh, that’s annoying. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.’

Fry waited as patiently as she could while he fumbled through his memories, but nothing seemed to be emerging.

‘Cooper?’ she suggested. ‘Sergeant Joe Cooper, perhaps?’

‘Who?’ said Dain. ‘Nah, that’s not it. Cooper? Where did you get that from?’ Then his face broke into a broken-toothed smile. ‘Nothing like it. Williams, that was his name. Big Welsh bloke. We called him Taffy.’

‘And the local bobby himself?’

‘Oh, Dave Palfreyman? He’s still around, all right. You won’t be able to miss him.’

Outside the Dog Inn, Fry stood for a moment in the rain. Something about the conversation in the pub was worrying her. Not the barely concealed hostility, or Ned Dain’s infuriatingly poor memory – if that’s what it was. No, it was a faint ambiguity that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Not anything that had been said, but something that had been missing.