Fry leaned against the side of a police van. ‘You know, in those circumstances, I think you’d probably get to a point where you didn’t care any more. You’d be asking yourself what the point of it all was. I mean, how could her life have been worth living? Rose Shepherd was sixty-one – she was facing the prospect of another twenty or thirty years living like this, but with her deliberate isolation becoming more and more difficult to maintain day by day. Personally, I think Rose Shepherd might actually have welcomed her fate, when it came.’

Cooper stared at her, surprised by her sudden burst of empathy. Fry stood beside the van, a slight figure, hardly enough of her to catch the rain.

But Cooper wasn’t at all sure about what she’d just said. He couldn’t feel convinced that Rose Shepherd had welcomed death. In this case, there had been too much of a tendency for people to think they could let the dust settle and return to some kind of normal life, their offences forgiven or forgotten, their past put far behind them.

But dust had a habit of showing tracks if it was left undisturbed too long. And, like the dust gathering in the Mullens’ smoke alarm, it could even mask the approach of danger, when it finally came burning out of the night.

‘Diane, there is another possibility that Miss Shepherd might have considered,’ said Cooper.

‘What’s that, Ben?’

‘I wonder if she thought she’d found a lifeline. She might have made contact with someone she thought she could get money out of.’

‘What?’

Cooper saw the sceptical look in her eyes, and started his train of thought all over again. ‘I asked about the rifle. You remember, the Romanian semi-automatic?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, apart from the military sniper rifle, there’s a sporting version of the PSL made for export, the Romak-3. It’s very similar, but has the bayonet lug ground off and some other modifications to comply with US import laws.’

‘A sporting version. Do you mean a hunting rifle?’

‘Yes. A hunting rifle.’

Fry tilted her head slightly to one side as she looked at him. ‘What are you thinking, Ben?’

He smiled at the echo of Liz’s words earlier. Liz had known what he was thinking before he said it. She’d known, even though he denied it. But Fry was different – she wanted it spelled out. She wanted to hear him explain it. They connected on quite a different level.

‘I listened to the tapes of John Lowther’s interviews,’ he said. ‘You remember his sentence referring to hunting? He said some people go “hunting for whores. No, for babies . . .”’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I wonder if that was an example of what Dr Sinclair called “clang associations”, a confusion of words with similar sounds or the same initial letters. I wonder if he meant some people go hunting boars.’

‘Boars?’