When he saw her approaching she noticed the surprise and disappointment on his face. Perhaps he’d been hoping for a Helen Mirren lookalike. These days, people expected senior female officers to walk straight out of Prime Suspect. He got up to shake her hand and she realized he was very tall. There weren’t many men who dwarfed her.

‘This is terrible,’ he said. ‘Jenny Lister was the best social worker I’ve ever met. I’m not sure what we’ll do without her. Her team is in pieces.’ He looked down at her bleakly. ‘I’m not sure what I’ll do without her. She kept the whole show on the road. Officially my deputy, but actually she was the one who kept me straight.’

That made Vera warm to him. Underneath the jargon and the ambition he was human after all. When he ordered a bowl of chips to go with his smoked-salmon baguette she liked him even more.

‘So she was good at her job?’

‘The understatement of the year.’ He dipped a chip into a bowl of mayonnaise. ‘If she’d wanted to, she could have gone to head up a social-services department. She was organized, an excellent supervisor, scarily clever.’

‘So why wasn’t she promoted?’ Vera had never quite believed in saints. What was it about Jenny Lister that she’d stayed in the field instead of taking the opportunity to become a manager?

‘She didn’t want it,’ he said. ‘She said she didn’t need the money or the aggro. And she’d miss working with clients and foster parents. She’d miss the kids.’

‘Did you believe her?’

The man looked up, shocked. ‘Of course! Jenny Lister didn’t lie.’

Not true, Vera thought. We all lie. We wouldn’t survive otherwise. It’s just that some of us do it better than others. Jenny Lister must have been a magnificent liar.

The man continued. ‘She loved being the most talented social worker in the place. Perhaps she knew management wouldn’t be her thing. She wouldn’t have wanted to be second best.’

‘What about her background?’ Vera asked. ‘Was she local?’

He looked up from his food. ‘Yes, born-and-bred Northumberland. Went south to university, but lived the rest of her life here.’

‘Are her parents still alive?’ Maybe Jenny had confided in them if they were local. Maybe they’d have Hannah to stay for a while.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She never talked about it, but my wife’s a local-history buff and came across the story in an old copy of the Hexham Courant. Jenny’s dad was a solicitor, seemed he was defrauding his clients. He took his own life before the case could go to court. The mother lived for a good few years after that, but she was never the same apparently. She couldn’t stand the shame. I think she lived in residential care somewhere on the coast. She died about ten years ago. I remember Jenny going to the funeral.’

Another woman with a crook for a father, Vera thought. Perhaps she and Jenny would have had things in common after all.