Fabian watched her and grew embarrassed by her outburst. Why was she doing this to him? What difference did it make, anyway?

The lawyer began packing away his papers but Vivienne walked to the desk and with one swoosh of her hand caused all the documents to fall to the floor, fluttering with a noisy whisper and then settling around her feet.

‘Mother!’ Fabian said again. But she wasn’t listening. She was incandescent with fury and Fabian was taken back to other times in his life when she’d shamed him in front of people in authority, whether it was school housemasters, or his father’s associates. He went to the desk and knelt down, trying to gather the papers, helped by the lawyer.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

They looked up at one another when they heard an almighty bang and realised that Vivienne had stormed out and slammed the huge oak door as hard as she could.

Chapter 46

Nellie Lowther gave the impression of a meek and weathered older lady, with all the innocence of a charity volunteer, or a school dinner lady. She dressed plainly, in dated prints, and wore a cleaning pinafore under her coat. Her hair was tightly curled as if recently coiffed and she smelled of Estée Lauder. Kelly reckoned that, if she was trying to pull off the harmless granny approach, then she was doing a cracking job. The woman had taught English at the school attended by Chloe Tate and Sasha Granger, and she was ticking the boxes for that stereotype too: stuffy, straight and staid.

‘Thanks for making the trek today; it’s treacherous out there,’ Kelly said. She knew that the woman had been hiding in her cottage at Laurie Fell, because Zoe had told her.

Nellie smiled nervously and held her coat close around her body. Nobody wanted to attend a police interview, it just set all the alarm bells off: fight or flight. Bar none, everybody hated it. Like insects under a microscope, they squirmed and wriggled, trying to get free. The only people who didn’t were kids. They told the truth, plainly, because they had yet to learn to lie.

Police interviews were a game, and part of a copper’s training was learning to play. The outcome was always more satisfying if it ended in some kind of confession. These days, without forensics, the CPS wasn’t going to fork out for a costly trial unless the case was watertight. A seasoned witness could scupper the whole thing. Kelly had yet to work out which type of witness Nellie Lowther was. Would she surprise them?

So far, Nellie’s demeanour was that of a person who was terrified, and this could work to Kelly’s advantage. At the end of the day, all she wanted was the truth, but that was the precise thing people didn’t want to give.

Not the whole truth, anyway.