As he approached, Vera saw that he was frowning. He would have had other plans for this evening. A night in with Sal and the bairns. Maybe wrapping the presents when the kids were in bed. Sal would be the organized type; she wouldn’t leave her Christmas shopping until the last minute. But Vera knew that Joe got bored with the perfect domestic life, although he’d never admit it, even to himself. Perhaps this murder had come as a lifesaver for him too.

‘What have you got for me, Joe?’ They moved into the shelter of the station concourse. Joe leaned against one of the ticket machines. The snow was falling so heavily now that they looked at the train through a shifting white curtain. Not a bad thing, Vera thought. People would blame the weather, not them, for disrupting the Metro system.

She listened while he described the journey from town, the packed train, the lippy youths and the pissed businessmen. She didn’t take notes at this point. Notes stopped her concentrating. She needed to picture herself in the carriage, listening to the banter.

She waited until he’d finished talking. ‘All good-tempered then? Nothing that could have led to a Christmas moment of madness? The victim hadn’t made a fuss about kids swearing or putting their feet on the seats?’

‘Not that I saw or heard. It was packed in there, but if there’d been any sort of row, I’d probably have noticed. Even when the train stopped and we all had to get out, nobody kicked off.’

‘What do we know about the victim?’ This was Vera’s favourite moment in an investigation. She was nosy, loved digging around in another person’s private life. Perhaps, she was forced to concede, because she had no personal life of her own.

‘Only what we could get from her Metro pensioner’s pass. She was carrying a handbag, but in it there was nothing but a purse, a set of house keys and a hankie.’

‘Money in the purse?’ There were druggies, Vera thought, who’d stab their granny for the price of a fix. But probably not in the Metro in the late afternoon.

‘Fifty quid and a bit of change.’

Not robbed then. ‘So what do we know about her?’

‘Her name’s Margaret Krukowski and she’s seventy years old. An address in Mardle. One, Harbour Street.’ Joe had stumbled over the surname.

‘What’s that? Russian, Polish?’

Joe shook his head. What would he know? ‘She was nearly home,’ he said. ‘Only one more stop on the Metro and she’d have been safe.’ Vera thought he was the most sentimental cop she’d ever known.

‘Did you see where she got on?’

‘Aye, Gosforth.’

One of Newcastle’s posher suburbs. A long way from Mardle in terms of class and aspiration.

Joe guessed what she was thinking. ‘More Gosforth than Mardle, from her appearance,’ he said.