Vera stopped, frozen, her arm still outstretched towards the board. Ashworth thought she might have a go at Charlie, call him stupid for dreaming up such a notion. One way of relieving the pent-up tension. But instead she nodded. ‘I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s worth considering. Who cared for Lister enough to kill for her?’

‘Her daughter,’ Holly called out from the back of the room.

‘Or her daughter’s boyfriend,’ Vera said. ‘Just because he’s besotted with the girl. I can see him committing murder if she asked him to do it. We mustn’t forget him.’

‘How would Hannah know Shaw?’ Ashworth was all in favour of brainstorming, but this was madness, fantasy time.

‘Wouldn’t they have gone to school together? Only a year between them. We know Simon went to a posh place in town, but Danny and Hannah were both students at the high school in Hexham. Let’s check that out with the teachers, other kids. It’s another connection between the Shaws and the Listers. Holly, you sort it, you’re good at that stuff and nearer in age to the kids than the rest of us.’

She stopped for breath, took a gasp of air. ‘Some more news. I got the call while we were with the Shaw family. They’ve found Jenny Lister’s bag. No news yet on the notebook, though. We’re still waiting to hear. Guess where the bag was found! Barnard Bridge. Just across the burn from Mallow Cottage, Connie Masters’s place.’ She looked around the room. ‘Any ideas?’

Silence. In another office someone burst out laughing. The noise seemed to tear at Vera’s nerves, and Ashworth expected another outburst about their lack of intelligence and about how crap they were as detectives, but she held it together. Instead she nodded towards Charlie.

‘What have you got on Morgan? According to Shaw’s mother, he and Danny were mates. At least Morgan seemed to have some sort of influence on the boy.’ She had set Charlie off to re-interview the people who had been working or playing in the health club the day Jenny Lister had died. Had any of them seen Michael Morgan that morning? He hadn’t had a clinic there that day, but had he used the gym or the pool? Ashworth imagined that Charlie had spent his day drinking tea in living rooms in tidy houses all over the Tyne valley, interviewing the wrinklies from the aqua-aerobic class. The sort of task he loved.

Charlie slumped into a seat near the front, licked his fingers and crunched into a ball the greaseproof paper he’d been holding.

‘A few sightings that day of young men who could have been Morgan, but nothing specific and nothing consistent. They’re so eager to help, you get the feeling they’d say anything to make you happy.’

‘Morgan’s not that young.’