She ran into her house, grabbed up her phone and dialled 999. As she waited for the call to connect, she moved over to the bay window to keep an eye on Stefan’s property.

‘I need the police!’ Judith said as soon as the call was answered. ‘There’s been a shooting at my neighbour’s house! Hurry! Someone’s been shot!’

The operator took down the details of Stefan’s address, recorded what Judith had seen, informed her that the emergency services would be on their way, and then ended the call. Judith felt deeply frustrated. Surely there was something else she could do, or someone else she could phone? What about the Coastguard? It was a waterside catastrophe after all. Or the RNLI?

Judith peered out of her window at Stefan’s property. It was still sitting there, apparently innocently, in the evening sunshine.

If anyone had been out on the river at that precise moment, and had had occasion to look up at Judith’s mansion, they’d have seen a very short and comfortably plump woman in her late seventies with wild grey hair standing entirely naked in her bay window, a cape over her shoulders as if she were some kind of a superhero. Which in many ways she was.

She just didn’t know it yet.

Chapter 2

Half an hour later, Judith saw a police car arrive at Stefan’s property and a uniformed police officer get out. Judith tried as best she could to keep her binoculars trained on him as he looked in through the windows of Stefan’s house and took a wander through the garden. She wanted to bellow across the river that the man should jolly well look harder, but she bit her tongue. She had to believe that he knew what he was doing, and he’d find evidence of whatever it was that had happened.

However, after twenty minutes of what Judith could only describe as a cursory search, the police officer returned to his car, got in and drove away.

Was that it? The man had barely explored the garden, and he’d not even entered Stefan’s house. Perhaps he’d gone to get reinforcements? So she kept on looking. And looking.

At midnight, Judith discovered that there was no more whisky in the decanter on the little table to her side. That was always a sign to go to bed. As she woozily ascended the heavy oak staircase, she found she had to hold onto the banister a bit more tightly than normal. She then turned left to go to her bedroom when her bedroom was really on her right, but once she’d corrected her course via a brief tangle with a recalcitrant aspidistra, she safely made her destination.