So only men and women are people, Colin? Wow. Just … wow. What about those of us who don’t slot neatly into your bigoted gender binary? Please, educate yourself. Also, there is no point trying to reason with Sondra Halliday – she too is a bigot, though of a different stripe from you.

1 Reply:

From: Sondra Halliday, London

Fuck all the way off, Herr Jennda. David Howard – you seem to be suffering from White Knight Syndrome, AKA Entitled Tosser Syndrome. I don’t need the endorsement of any man, so stop trying to insert yourself into feminism, which belongs to women and has nothing to do with you. You’re not wanted or needed. As for you, DC Conker Deep (you gave yourself away with ‘it sure as shit ain’t us’ when you should have said ‘them’ if you were pretending not to be a detective) … sorry once again if I hurt your delicate manfeelz, and, yes, please do educate yourself. ‘Deign’ is the word you’re looking for. ‘Dane’ is Hamlet.

Chapter 13

13

14/1/2015

The red-brick semi-detached house on Thress Street in Rawndesley had nothing to distinguish it apart from the colour of its door – an unusual shade that Sellers, if forced, would have described as sea green – and a small metal fountain in the mainly paved-over front garden, with water spouting from it. Around the fountain’s base were flat smooth stones of different sizes that hadn’t got there by accident; someone had arranged them in a kind of three-hump circle shape. Sellers wasn’t surprised, given whose house this was and what he’d learned about her in advance from her website. Still – it was nice that there were people who cared enough to make a shape out of matching stones around a fountain in their garden.

The door opened and a woman appeared.

‘Ms Baillie?’

‘DC Colin Sellers? Welcome!’ She beamed at him. ‘Please, call me Lane. All my friends and family do.’

Well, that was easy. Sellers told himself not to leap to conclusions.

Lane Baillie was in her late fifties or early sixties and dressed in a red tunic with a wide black belt, black leggings and slip-on pumps. Her outfit was too young for her, but it looked okay. Her smile made her seem much younger too, though her neat, short hair was silvery-grey, like tinsel, and her skin was lined. Sellers checked with himself: was she definitely middle-aged to old? Yes, her hands were covered in liver spots. She might even have been getting on for seventy, in fact.