“Yes. Like I do every Sunday.”

“And you didn’t see or hear anything unusual?”

“No. Nothing. It was very quiet out back. It usually is on a Sunday night, apart from next door’s cat now and then. I never have much rubbish. Just one little bag. I’ve told the council that I hardly need one of those huge bins, but they don’t listen. They have their rules, and they don’t want one batty old lady marching to the beat of a different drummer.” She grinned, showing crooked, yellow teeth. “Now, that would give them an excuse to lock me away, wouldn’t it?”

The neighbors on Malden Terrace would all be questioned, of course, as would the tenants of the dozen or so houses on the opposite side of the narrow lane, whose front doors were on Malden Close. In fact, officers would canvass the whole of the East Side Estate in the hopes that someone had noticed something and would be willing to share their knowledge with the police, unlikely as that seemed.

Banks had managed to get a decent picture of the victim’s face in profile with his mobile, and he showed it to her. “Do you recognize him at all?” he asked.

Mrs. Grunwell studied the image for a long time, then shook her head. “So very young. No, I don’t recognize him.”

“Have you seen anyone like him around the estate lately?”

“What? You mean a darkie?”

Banks swallowed. “Well . . . I . . . yes, I suppose. A Middle Eastern youth, at any rate.”

“George always called them darkies. Nothing against them, like, so long as they kept themselves to themselves.” She paused. “But we don’t get them around here. Hardly ever. I mean, I think I would have noticed him.”

That was true enough. There was a white belt between industrial West Yorkshire and Teesside. Even the chefs and waiters from the local Indian and Thai restaurants commuted to Eastvale from Leeds and Bradford, or Darlington and Middlesbrough after their shifts. The only truly multicultural area of Eastvale was around the college campus, and even that was probably below the national average. There had never been anything to attract immigrants to rural areas like Swainsdale, not even in the post-war years when the first arrivals from Pakistan and the West Indies started to come into the country, mostly in the north, to work in the cotton and woolen mills of the Pennine valleys between Leeds and Manchester. There were no factories in the Dales, no real service industries to speak of, and farm labor wasn’t very open to outsiders. Nor were rural communities. Things were changing these days, of course, but not a great deal, and not very quickly.

“Do you get out and about much?” Banks asked. “I mean, do you think if he had been local you might have seen him anywhere around the estate, or in town?”

“Don’t think that just because I’m eighty-five I can’t do my own shopping or enjoy a walk down by the river, young man. I’ll have you know I make a point of going out every morning for my newspaper, and as I don’t drive, I don’t go to the supermarket like everyone else. I use the local shops as and when I need them. We have a perfectly good butcher down the road, and a fine greengrocer.”