Jude answered. Once again, she saw no reason not to tell the truth. ‘I heard it from the other healer who your mother tried to set up for you.’

‘Oh. Jeremiah.’ He drenched the word in contempt. ‘Yes, he was as useless as the rest of the profession … if “profession” isn’t too generous a term for that bunch of charlatans.’

Jude knew he was being deliberately offensive but did not rise to the insult. Nor did she look at Carole, who was quite capable of nodding agreement to the sentiment.

‘Oh yes,’ Tom went on. ‘I suppose all you lot get together, don’t you, to spread nasty stories about your patients?’

Though this insinuation offended her even more, still Jude kept her own counsel. So, it was Carole who asked, ‘But what Jeremiah said was true? You did have a falling-out with Bill Shefford?’

‘“Falling-out”?’ He grimaced as he echoed the word. ‘I think that’s putting it a bit strong. He wanted me to work hard for him in a business in which I pretty soon realized I had no interest. So, we didn’t see eye to eye. I wouldn’t put it any worse than that. Our disagreement certainly didn’t bother me enough for me to set up a booby-trap to kill the guy.’

‘But you would have had the mechanical skills to do it if you’d wanted to?’ asked Carole sharply.

‘Maybe. But as I say, I’m far too lazy to bother with an elaborate scheme like that. Sorry to disappoint you but, beneath my lackadaisical exterior, there isn’t a rampant psychopath desperate to commit further atrocities.’

Not for the first time, Jude was struck how articulate Tom Kendrick was. He might have disappointed his father by the route he’d taken thereafter, but his public-school education had not been wasted. ‘Presumably,’ she said, ‘while you were working at Shefford’s, you did get a chance to see what was going on there?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You would have been able to get a feeling of the kind of tensions within the business … or within the family who ran the business?’

‘Oh, I see what you’re doing.’ He let out a grunt of laughter. ‘If it’s not me in the frame, who do I think the murderer might have been?’

‘Yes, all right. If that’s the way you want to see it.’

‘And I would like to say,’ Carole pointed out, ‘that in crime books and television programmes, a time-honoured method of diverting suspicion from oneself is finding the proof of who actually did commit the murder.’