‘The evening briefing, then I’m going home.’ Suddenly she felt tired and old. ‘I need a hot bath and an early night in my own bed.’ She looked at him hopefully. ‘Fancy calling in for a quick bite on your way back to the family? There’ll be something in the freezer. Joanna dropped in a lamb casserole last week. Their own meat. It’ll soon heat through. And it’ll give us a chance to talk about the investigation in the warm.’

He stood for a moment, his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s not on my way home. And your house is never warm.’ But she could tell he was weakening.

She drove ahead of him and had a fire lit before he arrived. The casserole had already been in the microwave and was now in a pan to finish it off. She knew he’d smell it as soon as he walked through the door. There were bottles of Wylam beer on the table under the window. She’d grown up in this house in the hills. Her mother had died here when Vera was still a child and she’d nursed Hector, her father – the man who still taunted her from the grave – until his death. The house was impractical and mucky, but she knew she’d never move. She hoped that she’d die here too.

In the kitchen she reran the briefing in her head. It had been Holly’s show. She’d been full of the information that Malcolm Kerr drove an old Golf and that he’d been back in Mardle at around three o’clock. Kerr had no alibi for the murder, then. And if he had given Margaret a lift to the Haven, he’d lied to Vera when he said he’d not seen her to talk to recently.

Joe came in without knocking. Vera nodded towards the beer. ‘You could have just the one to keep me company.’ Another ritual. Joe and her hippy neighbours were the only people who ever came into her house. She always offered them beer.

They ate the casserole with spoons from bowls on their knees. It was too cold to eat at the table away from the fire. A loaf stood on a board on the coffee table between them. They drank the beer straight from the bottle. Vera opened a second before they started discussing the case. Joe cleared the crockery into the kitchen – she would have left them on the floor. He came back shivering. ‘You don’t need a fridge out there. Have you never thought of getting central heating?’

‘Maybe when I retire. No point when I’m never here.’ Hector had thought central heating sapped a person’s strength.