She paused for breath and Holly took the opportunity to stick up her hand. ‘Could Shaw have killed Jenny then? How else would he have her notebook?’

‘How else indeed? It seems that Danny and Hannah had a bit of a fling before he went away to university. By all accounts it meant a lot more to him than to her, but of course we can’t get his take on that. We might assume that the fragments in the fire were stolen at the same time as Jenny’s handbag, after the murder, but I think we have to keep an open mind.’

‘What do you mean?’ Charlie, hunched over his coffee, seemed almost alert.

‘Maybe Hannah’s not telling us the truth, and Danny visited her when he was home from uni.’ Vera looked at her audience. ‘Maybe she thinks she’s too young to be settling down after all.’

‘No!’ Holly was horrified. ‘She’s devoted to Simon. No way would she cheat on him.’

‘We know Danny was in the Lister house a couple of years ago when he and Hannah were going out together,’ Vera went on. ‘But it’s unlikely he stole any material from Jenny then. What would be the point? It would have been before Elias’s death, so there’d have been no press interest.’

Ashworth lifted his hand from the desk in front of him. ‘It’d be interesting to find out if Morgan and Danny knew each other before they met at the Willows?’

‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ Vera gave no sign whether or not this idea had occurred to her. ‘I’d have thought Karen would have mentioned a previous connection with Morgan when we talked to her about him, but she was all over the place. Could you follow that up, Holly? With the mother and with any of Danny’s mates we can track down.’

Holly nodded and scribbled a couple of lines in her notebook.

Vera turned to Charlie. ‘Any joy in tracking down witnesses around the Shaw house the day Danny died?’

‘Nah. That place is like a dormitory village. Most people work in Hexham or Newcastle. During the day it’s quiet as the grave. I found an elderly gent who was taking his dog for a walk at about the right time. He was passed by a small car he didn’t recognize, but it could have belonged to anybody and he can’t even remember the colour of the vehicle.’

‘Anyone else got any bright ideas?’ Vera looked around the room. There was silence apart from the rain still gushing from a blocked gutter outside. ‘Actions then.’ She paused for effect, but Ashworth thought she’d had these worked out from the moment she stood up. Before that even. Who knew what she dreamed about at night?