‘No, thank you, Mrs Birtland. I won’t be keeping you long.’

Being called ‘Mr Cooper’ made him smile even more. That really was a rarity in this job.

‘Ted,’ called Mrs Birtland, ‘we’ve got a visitor.’

Edward Birtland didn’t get up when Cooper entered. He was seated in a well-used armchair by a random stone fireplace, a fragile man of about seventy. He held out a hand politely, and Cooper couldn’t do anything else but shake it. The grip of Mr Birtland’s fingers hardly registered.

‘So,’ he said, ‘how did you hear someone had been killed?’

‘The murder?’

‘Well . . .’

Frances Birtland chuckled. ‘It was Bernie. Our postman knows everybody.’

‘Of course he does.’

‘You brought him back to Foxlow when he’d nearly finished his round. He stopped and told a few people about it on the way home.’

‘I understand how Bernie Wilding knows everybody. The question I’ve come to ask you is how well you knew Rose Shepherd.’

‘We didn’t know her at all. She hadn’t been in the village long.’

‘About ten months,’ said Cooper. But it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that sort of period dismissed as if it was yesterday. Your family had to have lived in some of these villages for generations before you belonged.

‘Are you Foxlow people yourselves?’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Birtland. ‘We’ve lived here all our lives. We had a house on the High Street when we were married. We bought this little bit of land when Ted retired, and had the bungalow built. It took all the money we’d ever have – though we didn’t know it at the time.’

Cooper glanced at Mr Birtland, who smiled sadly and patted his wife’s hand.

‘I thought I had a good pension put away,’ he said, ‘with the company I worked for. But it didn’t turn out the way we planned. Once we’d paid for the bungalow, suddenly there was nothing left. So we just have our old age pensions to live on.’

‘The only way we could live any better is by selling the bungalow,’ said his wife.

‘And moving away from Foxlow, I suppose?’

She nodded. ‘And we could never do that.’

‘Can you think of anyone in the village who would have known Miss Shepherd better?’

Mrs Birtland shook her head. ‘No, not really.’

‘Have you tried the Ridgeways on the other side?’ said her husband. ‘They live in the barn conversion. Well, I say barn conversion – that was Church Farm until a few years ago. My grandfather was a cowman there. He worked for the Beeley family all his life. It’s gone now, and so have the Beeleys.’

‘One of my colleagues is talking to Mr and Mrs Ridgeway. Do you think they might have known Miss Shepherd well, then?’

‘We couldn’t say.’

‘Don’t you talk to the Ridgeways either?’