Kate was going to mention it: You must see a difference in the place. Because really there was no comparison to the way it had been before she took over, and he hadn’t been in the house recently, had he? Margaret had never taken visitors to her room. But before she could speak, Malcolm turned and almost ran down the steps to the pavement. It was as if he’d been chased away. He lifted his hand to wave goodbye to her, but didn’t turn round and didn’t stop walking.

Kate shut the door and locked it, then returned to the kitchen. The music was still burbling as if nothing had happened, and she felt for a moment as if the encounter with Malcolm Kerr was the subject of the song. Vera Stanhope had left her business card on the breakfast table when she’d got up to leave. ‘Just in case you remember something that might be useful.’ Kate took it from the dresser and held it between her fingers. And then on impulse she reached for her phone.

‘No matter what it is,’ Vera had said. ‘It’s the trivial things that make the difference.’

Kate felt like a child again. The good girl at the front of the class, wanting the teacher to like her. Eager to please. She told Vera that Malcolm had been at the house and that Margaret had worked for him and his father.

‘I had the feeling,’ Kate said, after Vera had listened patiently to her explanation, ‘that they were more than friends.’

Chapter Eleven

Vera had never been bothered by post-mortems. Dead people couldn’t hurt you; it was the living you should be frightened of. Paul Keating, the pathologist, was from Belfast. He was a religious man, taciturn and dignified, and a great golfing friend of crime-scene manager Billy Wainwright. Vera wondered what the two men could talk about on the course or in the bar after the game. She sometimes thought they would have nothing in common except the dead.

The mortuary was even chillier than usual and she wondered if the electricity had cut out at the hospital overnight too, as it had in the freezing police station, because of the heavy snowfall. The woman lying on the table certainly looked cold. Frozen. Vera wasn’t squeamish, but she wished they would cover her with a blanket.

Keating was talking, recording his first impressions. Vera listened to his words, but she was thinking that Margaret was good for her age: not a lot of spare flesh except for a little fat around the waist, and the woman still had cheekbones to die for. Vera remembered Joe’s admiration of the young Margaret in her wedding photograph and felt a familiar itch of jealousy. She hadn’t been much admired even when she was twenty. Joe obviously liked thin lizzies; his Sal was all skin and bone.