There was a pause, during which he heard the tapping of keys. Then she asked, ‘Was that just a one-off situation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you and your wife argue often?’

‘No – no more than any other couple.’

More tapping of keys, then, ‘Does your wife have any history of mental health problems?’

‘No, none.’

‘Has she ever self-harmed?’

‘Self-harmed? Like cutting herself, do you mean?’

‘Any instance where she might have deliberately injured herself?’

‘Absolutely not,’ he said.

There was a brief silence, punctuated with more key tapping, then she asked, ‘Has your wife, Eden, ever talked about suicide with you? Have you ever considered her a suicide risk?’

‘No, no way.’

‘So you wouldn’t consider it a possibility?’

Niall nearly shouted at the woman. ‘Not remotely. I cannot in a million years believe she would do that. And all we’d been bloody arguing about was cat litter. You think she’d go and kill herself over cat litter?’

There was no response for a moment. Just the sound of a keyboard again. Then the woman said, ‘If you can remain where you are, sir, I’ll dispatch a unit to you as soon as possible.’

‘Sure,’ Niall said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. How long do you think that will be?’

‘I’ll do my best to get a car to you within the next hour. If anything changes in the meanwhile, please call us back.’

Niall said he would.

11

Monday 2 September

‘Tell me I didn’t hear you right,’ Glenn Branson said. He had barged into Roy Grace’s office, as usual without knocking, and perched himself in front of the Detective Superintendent’s desk, chair the wrong way round, so that he was leaning, arms folded, across the back as if he was in some Wild West saloon – the position he regularly favoured.

Just when he thought that Glenn Branson’s ties could not get any brighter or more lurid, the thing knotted to the DI’s pink shirt this morning, now flipped back over his shoulder, looked like an angry, striking cobra.

Grace sipped his coffee, both irritated and pleased at the same time by his colleague’s uninvited appearance in his office. Irritated because he was trying to concentrate on writing an update report on his experiences in the Met with the Violent Crime Task Force, which the Chief Constable had asked for in order to see what Sussex Police could learn to help them with the surge in knife crime in the county. And pleased because he always liked Branson’s company, and he could do with a distraction from two hours of fierce concentration.

‘You heard me right.’

‘Chicken husbandry? Excuse me, just what is that? You’re not getting weird on hens? I mean, there are some pretty kinky websites out there – but chickens?’

‘Matey, I can’t help your warped mind. But this isn’t going to feed it. Cleo and I are doing a course in chicken husbandry at Plumpton Agricultural College tomorrow. A one-day course. Bruno’s taken a big interest in our hens, he really seems to love them – two in particular, the ones with the fluffy feet. Bruno’s named them Fraulein Andrea and Fraulein Julia. We want to encourage his interest.’