“You should talk to Fred Elliot,” she said. “He’s the postmaster and he’s leading the campaign against Henshaw. He’s a parish councillor. He’d not have sent any letter to Mrs. Parry. But his son, Charlie, is a difficult man. Likes an argument. You know the type. My man took him on as a mechanic when he came back from the army. I wasn’t happy about it. I thought there’d be trouble. But Tom is a good man. He though it was his duty …” Ramsay thought she was going to tell him something else, something personal, but she straightened her back and continued: “Charlie might have sent the letter just to stir up trouble.”

“Does he live with his father?”

Olive laughed, a sharp, bitter laugh. “Charlie can’t afford a house of his own either. Mrs. Parry’s scheme would have helped him, too.”

There was a knock on the door and Tom Kerr came in, carrying a tray with cups of coffee that rattled on their saucers as he set it on the table.

“I’ll leave you to it,” he said, and then directly to Olive: “ I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”

Ramsay stood up and handed one of the cups to Olive.

“Tell me about the family,” he said. “ How did Mrs. Parry get on with them?”

Olive sniffed and spooned sugar into the thick brown liquid.

“Well enough,” she said. “ I suppose. She loved the bairns. Spoiled them silly. Not my way of bringing up children, but you couldn’t blame her. She never had any of her own, though she practically looked after Carolyn singlehanded until she was one. Stella was poorly—postnatal depression, they said, though she’s always had trouble with her nerves. She was in hospital a lot and her family weren’t much use. So James used to bring the baby there before he went to work and pick her up in the evening.”

“What about the adults?” Ramsay asked. “ Were they close to her?”

“Close enough when they wanted something,” she said. “A nice weekend in the country, someone to mind the bairns when they wanted to be out. They never bothered to see if Mrs. Parry needed them. She liked their company and she wasn’t getting any younger. It wouldn’t have hurt them to call in and spend more time with her. They say they’re busy. We’re all busy. She never complained. Said she had her own life to live, and that was true enough. But she would have liked to see more of them, all the same …”

She paused, but Ramsay said nothing. He was thinking it would be dangerous to take what Mrs. Kerr was saying too seriously. She was reinforcing his own prejudices about the Laidlaws and he needed to keep an open mind. Still, he hoped she would continue. At the beginning of an investigation he had endless patience.