In the Express office James Laidlaw heard Mary’s car from his desk and walked to the window to watch her arrive. The car’s exhaust had been going for days and she claimed not to have the time or the money to get it mended. He wondered sometimes why he had ever employed her. Her lack of organisation was legendary. He watched her climb clumsily out of the small car and heard her come up the stairs. Then she burst into the office, dropping scarf, keys, files onto the floor.

“Don’t look at me like that, Marg!” she said to the receptionist. “You’ve got to be kind to me. I’ve got a hangover.”

“Where have you been?” James asked, standing in the doorway.

“Magistrates court,” she said. “ It’s the first Monday of the month. I knew you wouldn’t want to do it today. The flasher from Whittingham was up. Otherwise it was all motoring.”

“Oh.” James was momentarily distracted. “ What did he get?”

“Remanded for social enquiry reports,” she said. “ There were a couple of drunk drivings and a strange thing happened—” She broke off, realising that legal gossip was inappropriate. “ I’m so sorry about your aunt Alice, James,” she said. “ Isn’t it awful? She was such a nice lady.”

“Yes,” he said. “ She was.”

“I met her, you know, on the afternoon before she died.”

“Yes,” he said. “ She told me.”

“She was so sympathetic. So easy to talk to.”

“Have the police been to see you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “ They might have been to the flat. I haven’t been in much. I went to a party in Newcastle on Saturday night and stayed with friends in town. I didn’t get home until late last night. When exactly did she die?”

“Saturday night,” he said. “At about midnight.”

“So she died soon after I’d seen her,” she said. “Do the police know who killed her?”

He shrugged. “ They won’t tell me,” he said, “but there was a lot of ill feeling in the village about the new housing development.”

“I know,” she said. “I was at the residents’ meeting on Saturday afternoon. They were really angry.”

He looked at her sharply. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said. “ Why were you there? We’d decided not to cover the Brinkbonnie development because I couldn’t be objective.”

“I thought I could cover it objectively,” she said. “And if you didn’t want to run the story, someone else might.”

“We don’t work that way here,” he said. “I intend to run a paper with standards.”