Fry sat back. ‘Well, sir, for a man who thought he wasn’t doing any harm, you’ve certainly wasted a lot of people’s time.’

‘God damn the man,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘I could cheerfully strangle him with his own drill cord.’

‘At least he’s talking now. I’ve got someone taking a statement from him, and we’ll speak to his sister, too, to see if their accounts tally. But I believe he’s telling us the truth now.’

‘Meanwhile, it’s back to square one in our picture of Rose Shepherd. When we ignore all the stuff that Grice made up to keep the gossips happy, the information we have about her now amounts to what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It can’t do.’

‘Sweet FA, if you prefer.’

‘No, no. We do have some verifiable facts. We’ve got to have some.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

Hitchens looked at the board, scrubbed off some of the details and studied what was left. ‘She’s a British passport holder, born in London. And we’ve got her age – she was born in 1944.’

‘A wartime baby.’

‘Yes. Maybe her parents were killed in the Blitz or something.’

‘I thought we were looking at the verifiable facts.’

‘OK. Well, we’ve got her name, age, place of birth. And her physical details – height, weight, hair colour. She moved to Foxlow ten months ago, and she came here from London. She had plenty of funds, because Bain House wasn’t cheap, and she was a cash buyer.’

‘And apart from that . . . ?’

Hitchens tilted his head on one side to look at the photograph of the victim from a different angle. It didn’t seem to tell him anything new.

‘That’s about it,’ he said. ‘We’re no nearer to filling in her past history. Or to tracing any personal contacts, now the famous Dougie from Glasgow has proved mythical.’

‘Have we talked to everyone in her address book?’

‘Almost everyone. One or two companies that are listed have gone out of business. The odd thing is that her book only dates from the day she moved into Bain House. Apart from the solicitor and the estate agent, nobody we’ve spoken to had any contact with her before November last year.’

‘Did any of these individuals detect an accent?’

‘Only those who were offered a leading question by the officer interviewing them. In other words, if they were asked whether Miss Shepherd had a Scottish accent, they agreed she might have done. Otherwise, they had no suggestions to offer.’

‘Grice has a lot to answer for.’