The room was smaller than the lounge and the style was different. Ashworth imagined men in white jackets and girls in flapper dresses with headbands and long cigarette holders. There were shelves with cocktail glasses, and a silver cocktail shaker stood on the curved wooden bar. Behind it a spotty adolescent sat on a high stool, reading the sports page of the Chronicle, spoiling the atmosphere. All the staff, it seemed, had been told to continue working as if there hadn’t been a murder by the pool. The boy obviously resented their interrupting him. ‘Sorry, the hotel is closed.’

Karen flashed him a smile. ‘I’m staff and he’s fuzz.’

They sat at a table near the window looking out over the garden towards the river, she with a glass of Chardonnay and he with an orange juice. He saw that the lawns had been cut, but the borders were wild and overgrown. It occurred to him, in another uncharacteristic flash of whimsy, that they could look like lovers – the younger married man and the lively divorcee, both looking for fun or passion or companionship. Didn’t such people meet in hotels like this? For the first time he could almost understand the attraction of such an affair, the excitement.

‘I can’t be long. My husband will be expecting his tea on the table.’ Shattering the fantasy. Why had he assumed she’d be divorced?

‘How long have you worked at the Willows?’

She pulled a face. ‘Two years.’

‘You don’t enjoy it?’

‘Like I said, it’s pretty tedious. But I’m not qualified to do anything else. I thought I’d spend my days as a kept woman. Maybe I’d find anything that involved sucking up to a boss a bit hard to take.’

She paused, but he didn’t interrupt. He could tell she liked an audience. She’d keep talking.

And she did: ‘My husband has a property business. He bought up a bunch of cheap Tyneside flats before the boom, did them up to a basic standard and let them out to students. But lots of the work was done on credit. He always thought he’d be able to sell on, if things got tight.’

She paused again and this time he did stick in a few words. Just to show he was listening. ‘But when things got tight, nobody wanted to buy . . .’

‘Yeah. Suddenly the cash dried up. It was a shock to the system. No more holidays abroad, no new flash cars. We even had to sack the cleaner.’ She grinned at him to show she was mocking herself, the whole crazy lifestyle. It was clear that she hadn’t been brought up to money.

She continued more seriously: ‘I mean, we survived, but it wasn’t easy. Then Danny went off to uni and we had his fees to pay. He’s our only son and we didn’t want him to go short. Jerry was working his bollocks off, so the only thing to do was for me to get off my backside and get a job. I’d been a member of the Willows Health Club, so when I saw this post advertised I thought: That’ll do for me. And it’s OK. But I hadn’t reckoned on the boredom factor.’