‘Shut up,’ she hissed. ‘Game face.’ In response to their ring, the inhabitant of the first cottage was approaching, a dim shadow through the stained-glass surround of the door. They both put on their death-knock faces – sombre, serious. Sympathy allayed with a hint of suspicion, because nine times out of ten the murder victim had been done in by someone they knew. Awareness of this fact made dating hard for Alison, even without Tom’s disgusting window into the male mind.

‘Hello. I’m DC Hegarty, this is DC Khan. Can we come in? I’m afraid we have some bad news.’

Elle

Elle

‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ She must have heard those same words fifty times in the weeks since it happened. The funeral director, the police, the life insurance company, explaining that no, her husband did not in fact have a policy with them, it had been cancelled the year before for some inexplicable reason. The neighbours. The morgue staff, who’d sympathetically blocked her requests to have his body back sooner. An autopsy had been necessary. Perhaps an inquest later on. Now, at least, she had been able to bury him. He was dead. It seemed – almost funny. It was stupid, because it was always him who was alive and her who was dead. She’d been dead most of her life before she met him. She breathed, she smiled, she sat in concert halls and played the piano, but she was dead all the same.

She’d been surprised how few people came to the funeral. They had no family, of course, both of them orphans and alone in the world. Or as good as, anyway. There were more ways to be an orphan than just death. Hardly anyone from the hospital, just that man James Conway, who she’d always distrusted. He had the red nose of a drinker, and she knew he’d been married three times, each time to a younger woman who left him in the end. She’d always been worried Patrick would go the same way, under Conway’s bad influence. But at least he was there, and he pressed her hand with his shaky ones. The smell of him reminded her of her father, the reek coming from his room most mornings. She couldn’t entirely blame him, having to live with her mother. But still. She could and did blame him for some of it.

She said, ‘Thank you. I have to say, that hospital should be ashamed! No one else here! What about the theatre nurses, the consultants?’

Conway had frowned. ‘Well – people are busy, Elle.’