‘Wow!’ breathed Marie. ‘I never expected actual evidence.’

‘Me neither,’ said Rory. ‘Apart from the teeny, weeny, little smudge of blood, and the edge of his shoe catching the pool of Nan’s blood on the floor, it was a perfectly executed, premeditated murder.’

‘And your post-mortem results showed nothing else untoward?’ Jackman asked.

‘I reckon that lady would have made it to a telegram from the Queen, no trouble at all. For her years, she was as fit as a butcher’s dog. Okay, she had arthritis and needed a couple of blood pressure tablets, but overall, our Nancy was in the rudest of good health.’

‘So what on earth did she do to get herself so ruthlessly killed?’ said Jackman.

‘That’s where I hand over to your department,’ said Rory. ‘I haven’t the foggiest. Do tell, won’t you, as soon as you find out? It’s giving me sleepless nights, and you know how I need my beauty sleep.’ He stood up. ‘And now I must return to the Kingdom of the Dead. Good luck, and don’t forget — the moment you know . . .’

CHAPTER NINE

Ratty Jones sat in the caravan and stared at his mother’s sleeping form. She was ageing so fast it scared him. In the space of a month, she seemed to have gone from being active and fiercely independent to feeble and helpless.

He stood up, went through to the tiny kitchen and put the kettle on. She never slept for long. Soon, she’d be waking and demanding a cuppa. He’d drunk more tea in the last week than he ever had before.

Ratty was struggling. He needed to get out. Being cooped up in this stinking old van did him no good at all. The nights were especially hard. The nights belonged to him. His greatest pleasure was walking the deserted streets in darkness, slipping from the shadows into other people’s gardens and private spaces. He found the motion-activated sensor lights particularly annoying, but he knew who had them now. In any case, most people installed them and then turned them off, after finding that every passing cat, rat, bat or night bird set them off.

He made the tea, placed one mug by his mother’s bed and returned to his chair with the other. It wouldn’t be long before he was forced to leave her at night, if only for an hour or two. Despite knowing what he might be accused of if he were stopped, the compulsion to go out was becoming too strong to resist.

It was a craving, this impulse to get inside strangers’ houses unnoticed. To invade their personal spaces unseen. Uneducated but by no means stupid, Ratty supposed it was a form of power. Control. He suspected it came from a childhood blighted by a violent father who hated him. Whatever the cause, it was too late to address it now. The bastard was long dead, leaving Ratty a legacy of shattered self-esteem that only the nights could assuage.