By now, Barney Poulton was naming names. ‘If there were to be any official investigation, I think there’s no question that Malee Shefford would be the first person the police would want to interview.’

‘With you there,’ said Frankie, whose presence it was that had hurried Jude to the bar with a second order of Sauvignon Blanc. Frankie was drinking something that looked like Coca-Cola but smelt strongly of rum. On the counter in front of Barney Poulton was the half-empty pint glass which was such an essential prop for his self-appointed role.

Jude saw the relief in Ted Crisp’s eyes at their approach. ‘Two more of the usual, is it?’ he asked her, glad to have something else to do, apart from listening to the Sage of Fethering.

Jude greeted Barney and Frankie warmly. Though she didn’t know either of them well, she didn’t suffer from her neighbour’s hang-ups about the difference between ‘people who you know who they are’ and ‘people who you’ve been introduced to’. Carole had had many dealings with Frankie at Shefford’s, so she reckoned that was the equivalent to being introduced. She had, however, previously managed to avoid one-to-one conversation with Barney, so her greeting to him was appropriately awkward and aloof.

‘We were talking,’ he explained, as though his voice hadn’t been loud enough to fill the entire bar, ‘about the recent death of the much-lamented Bill Shefford.’ He made it sound as though he’d been cruelly deprived of the company of an old friend. Whereas, if they had once or twice had a discussion about repairs to his car, that was the extent of their acquaintanceship. But to his mind, Barney Poulton’s fiefdom covered all of Fethering.

‘And I was expressing the opinion that his wife – now widow – Malee could not be excluded from any discussion on the subject. Of course, I don’t say that because she’s of foreign extraction.’

How often in Fethering, Jude wondered, had she heard people say the exact opposite of what they felt?

‘I say it because, when there is an incident of a suspicious death, one’s first question has to be: “Cui bono?”’ Barney seemed to decide that using Latin tags did not chime appropriately with his image as a salt-of-the-earth Fethering local, so went on to explain, ‘Who benefits from the crime? And when a married man is murdered, the most likely beneficiary is his wife.’

‘That may be the case,’ said Jude, not liking the assumptions that were being so quickly made. ‘But that doesn’t mean that the wife is guilty of any crime. We don’t even know that we’re talking about a murder, do we?’ This was in spite of what she had just said to Carole. Jude didn’t want to encourage further gyrations of the Fethering rumour-mill.

‘I think we are,’ said Frankie firmly.

‘Talking about a murder?’ asked Carole.