She did as instructed, despite feeling no apprehension about intruders. Even if someone out there had malevolent intentions towards her, they had probably done their worst by framing her for the murder of Grace. There could be no possible reason to physically harm her; no sense in taking such a risk. Except, said a little voice, that you have a reputation for pinning down killers and helping the police. That might be enough for somebody to want you dead. She confronted this idea full on, doing her best to take it seriously. Murder was serious. That sometimes had to be repeated and emphasised, when she was immersed in a puzzle involving people she didn’t know personally. She could all too easily detach her emotions when trying to figure out a matter of logic and logistics.

She had not warmed to Grace and was shamefully unmoved by her death. Whether the woman had been a victim or a member of some revolting gang, she did not seem a very great loss to the world. That alone was a disgraceful way to think. ‘No man is an island,’ she reminded herself. ‘Every death diminishes me.’ She had frequently struggled to accept this assertion as literally true. So many deaths occurred every day. Little deaths, of birds and fish and aborted human foetuses. She wished she hadn’t added this last, because she found the subject 146of abortion too big and too sad to contemplate without severe discomfort. She carried with her somewhere the conviction that the death of these countless thousands of little half-formed human beings cheapened life in its widest sense. So did the slaughter of animals for food and the wanton hunting and shooting of them for sport. Sometimes she would reach the conclusion that the murder of one more person did not weigh so very heavily in the balance, after all.

Nonetheless, she did want to find an answer to what had taken place here in this house on Sunday morning. A person had gripped Grace by the neck, pressing hard enough to block the blood flow to her brain, and thereby killed her. Thea herself was small and not especially strong. She did not know the exact place to squeeze in order to kill someone. If she had done it, Grace would have had plenty of time to kick and scream and scratch and bite in resistance to the assault. She, Thea, would have fumbled and faltered and thoroughly failed to inflict anything in the way of damage. And why would she want to, anyway? This unanswerable question was enough in itself to reassure her that nobody would ever seriously consider her as a viable suspect.

She made herself a mug of tea and constructed a sandwich from her purchases made at Waitrose. The house wrapped itself contentedly around her, enduring the battering its back wall had taken, and oblivious to the sudden death that had happened upstairs. There was no suggestion of a ghostly reappearance of the murdered woman. She had already seemed oddly insubstantial 147when Thea had met her; entirely self-contained and unwilling to share anything but the most basic facts about herself. And even they might not have been true. And if they were, then the police might already have located her on an airline passenger list, and be matching her up to some definite identity that explained who she was and why she had come to Britain.