James Wing muttered something inaudible, then said, ‘Only to un-occur a few weeks later. Sorry. Go on, Grace. It’s painful, but I’ll sit it out.’

‘Right,’ said Woolston. ‘Well, another of Rhian and Dolan’s neighbours, seventy-one-year-old Muriel Pearson – the deaf lady I mentioned earlier, with the too-loud TV in the noise dispute – she lives at number 20 Nettle Edge, and she remembered suddenly, long after she’d told us she hadn’t seen anything suspicious on the afternoon of Rhian’s murder, and long after we’d said, “Are you absolutely sure?” and she’d said, “Oh, yes, quite sure!” – she remembered that she had, lo and behold, seen a blonde woman behaving suspiciously outside her house.’

‘And we got all excited,’ said Wing bitterly. ‘We imagined that if we could only scrape Blondie’s cheek with a wooden stick, we’d get our DNA match with the Billy mugs.’

‘Further probing based on what Muriel Pearson was watching on telly revealed that she might well have seen this woman at around the time Rhian was killed,’ Woolston went on. ‘What she described was this: she was watching TV, with the volume turned up very loud because she’s completely deaf—’

‘Yeah, and even though she can’t hear any better with the volume up as high as it’ll go, because she can’t hear sod all, she still puts it up to max, because she’s hard of hearing – so if she’s ever going to hear anything, it’s only going to be with the volume on full, isn’t it?’ Wing shook his head. ‘As if the fu— As if the telly’s going to restore her hearing by yelling at her at the top of its voice.’

‘DC Wing, I understand that this is your case and you want to—’ Kerensa Moore began.

‘Sorry, Doc.’ Wing held up his hands. ‘All right, I’ll shut up until it’s time for my star turn.’

Grace Woolston went on in the weary tone of one who expects to be interrupted. ‘Muriel Pearson was sitting in her living room watching TV, volume way way up, and she had a sense there was, as she put it, “someone else there when there should have been no one else there” – because she was alone in the house as far as she knew. Then she saw something out of the corner of her eye, so she turned to her left and got the fright of her life when she saw a woman with blonde hair – straight, shoulder-length, heavy fringe down to just above her eyebrows – standing right outside her house and staring in through her window. Muriel’s eyesight’s pretty good – much better than her hearing. It was assumed she was as reliable a witness as any.’

‘That’s right, rub it in,’ James Wing muttered.