Vera thought about this for a moment and wondered where people would place her in the social order of things, if they saw her. Bag lady? Farmer?

‘We’ll go then, shall we?’ she said. ‘See if anyone’s at home waiting for Margaret Krukowski.’

They sat for a moment in the Land Rover outside the house. The Harbour Guest House. A wooden sign beside the front door, the letters almost obscured by snow.

‘We bring the kids here sometimes, to the Mardle Fisheries,’ Joe said. ‘A treat. It’s supposed to be the best fish and chips in the North-East.’

Vera had her own memories of Mardle. Hector bribing some boatman to take them out to Coquet Island in the middle of the night. Lights still on in the warden’s house at one end of the island. Music and noise, some party going on there. Her terror that they’d be discovered, while Hector was caught up in the chase for roseate terns’ eggs. He’d always loved the risk. She thought he’d been motivated more by the danger than by the obsession that led him to steal and trade in rare birds’ eggs.

‘Well,’ Joe said. ‘Are we going in? I’ve got a home to go to.’

She nodded and climbed out of the vehicle, trying to remember if the guest house had been here when she’d been a kid. She remembered the street as rundown, almost squalid, but that had been more than forty years ago. She rang the bell.

The woman who answered was about the right age to be the victim’s daughter. Late thirties, early forties. Curly black hair and brown eyes, the colour of conkers, a pleasant, almost professional smile. She reminded Vera of a nurse. When Vera introduced herself, she stood aside to let them in. ‘Is there some problem?’

When the police turned up at the door people felt either guilty or scared. Vera couldn’t work out which the reaction was here. She followed the woman to the back of the house, into a warm lounge furnished with heavy furniture that would have seemed out of place in a smaller room, and they sat down on plush, velvet sofas. There was an upright piano against one wall, music on the stand, and against another a sideboard with decanters and bottles of spirits. Vera thought a tot of malt whisky was just what she needed after hanging around on a cold Metro station, but she knew better than to say anything. The curtains had been drawn and the place decorated for Christmas, with holly and sprayed silver pine cones along the mantelpiece and tall red candles on the occasional tables. It looked like a Victorian drawing room.