‘I do, yes. Yet another of the Wheelwright relations. This couple here were her parents, in fact. Why do you ask?’321

‘Um … I just saw the name somewhere.’ Norma was a nice person, she repeated frantically to herself. There was nothing to worry about.

‘It all connects, you see,’ the woman was saying, in a friendly tone, rather proud, if anything, of the big, solid, middle-class family she belonged to. ‘Even young Ben has his roots here. We’ve been trying to persuade him to come back and live here, you know. But he seems wedded to the Lake District.’

‘He’s a bit young, isn’t he, for that sort of decision?’

‘You might think so, I suppose. But such a clever boy is an asset to the family. We don’t want to lose touch with him.’

‘Is he an only child?’

‘Oh, no!’ laughed Norma. ‘Ben’s the second in a family of five. But he’s the only one who ever showed any interest in his mother’s relatives, and even he gets very confused by it all.’

There was something meaningful in the constant repetition of the word family, Thea realised. And something even more meaningful in the fact that the woman who had died in the Corner House was connected to this self-important collection of people, who evidently placed great significance on genes and inheritances and errant branches who went off to places like Cumbria and even presumably China. But it couldn’t possibly lead to a person being murdered. Here, she decided, was the moment of truth, crunch time. Assuming Norma really was here on her own, it was as safe a moment as she could hope for to reveal 322something of what she knew, and to ask a whole lot of questions.

‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I think that woman who was killed at the weekend was another member of your family. I suppose you must have known her. She only lived in Banbury. Not far away at all.’

Norma was slow to react. Then she simply shook her head and said, ‘No, no. You’ve got that totally wrong. From what I heard, the woman was Chinese. She must have got on the wrong side of somebody in a tour group. Things can get terribly heated on those buses, you know. The same people squashed up together day after day, all kinds of arguments can break out, and then get completely exaggerated.’

‘Enough to lead to murder?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

Despite Ben’s discoveries and her own suspicions, Thea was half persuaded. It did fit with the few fragile facts she knew. ‘Is that what everybody in the village thinks?’

Norma shrugged. ‘We haven’t really discussed it. And honestly – she can’t possibly be a relative. We’d know, if she was.’ Her manner was disarmingly transparent, the eyebrows raised again in sincere denial.

‘Well, her name was Wheelwright. Could it be that some of the others knew, but not you?’

Norma went quiet and rather pale. She swallowed down her obvious shock and smiled. ‘I hardly think so. You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick there. Who told you that, anyway? It’s impossible. We’ve all been beavering away at the whole ancestry thing for years 323now, sharing our findings. Listen – let me phone Richard and see what he says about it. If you’re right, then there’s something very secretive going on, and I want to find what it is.’