‘So?’

‘So it makes it extremely hard to separate the sheep from the goats, the legal from the illegal. And it creates a whole subculture of migration tricks, designed to get a foot in the door of a nice peaceful country where work’s easy to find.’

Thea shook her head. ‘That doesn’t fit. She was too self-confident, too well educated, to be one of those people.’

‘You’d be surprised. We’ve had people at the top of their profession turning up pleading for asylum, looking as if they’ve spent a month in a ditch. Which some of them have, probably.’

‘I still don’t think it applies to Grace.’

‘But she was frightened? She behaved like a fugitive?’132

‘Yes. She cowered behind me with her face turned away when the cars went past. And I’m sure she had a damaged shoulder. It can’t all have been an act.’

‘But she didn’t say how that had happened?’

‘Well, yes – she said she fell off that stupidly high stile. But she also told me it was dislocated, when I first met her, and I could see it wasn’t as bad as that.’

‘But she refused to go to a doctor?’

‘Well, not exactly. I wouldn’t have been able to take her to one, even if I knew where to go on a Saturday afternoon. It didn’t occur to me to call an ambulance – it wasn’t bad enough for that. And it seemed to get a bit better on its own once she was in the house. We decided it didn’t need a sling or anything like that.’

The man gave her a steady, considering look. ‘The pathologist couldn’t find anything wrong with her shoulder,’ he said.

‘Oh! Well, pulled muscles must be hard to spot. Would there be any signs, once she was dead?’

He actually winced at the starkness of her words. ‘It would have to be a very minor injury.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m married to an undertaker, remember. I’m used to dead bodies.’

‘Ah.’ He glanced down at the page of notes in front of him, turning back to look at earlier sheets. ‘Nobody thought to mention that.’

‘It’s not important. Just means you don’t have to worry about being unduly delicate in what you say to me.’

Again he looked long and hard at her. ‘You are aware, aren’t you, that on paper you look like the best – and 133only – proposition for having perpetrated this unlawful killing?’

‘Prime suspect,’ she said, with a rueful smile. ‘But only on paper, surely? I mean – nobody can possibly think I really did it. Why would I?’

‘“Why” questions are not always helpful,’ he told her ponderously. ‘Why would you take a total stranger into the house, to start with? Not even your own house. And then leave her there completely unattended and vulnerable, when you knew she was afraid of being found?’

Thea experienced a moment of self-knowledge. ‘You know what? I think I was hoping she’d just quietly creep away, if I left the door unlocked. When she didn’t answer my call before I went out, I was half-thinking she might already have gone. I went off like that to give her a chance to get right away. But at the time, I wasn’t consciously thinking that. It was all instinct and gut feelings, until now.’