Rhoda Gradwyn had somehow or other got hold of the postmortem report. Death had been by strangulation and the injuries to the face, which had destroyed the eyes and broken the nose, were inflicted after death. Gradwyn had also traced and interviewed one of the police officers concerned with the case. There had been no mystery. Death had occurred at about three-thirty on a Saturday afternoon when the grandmother, then aged sixty-nine, had gone to a local hall to play bingo. It was not unusual for the children to be left alone. The murder had been discovered when the grandmother returned home at six o’clock. Lucy’s body was on the floor of the kitchen in which the family mostly lived, and Shirley was upstairs asleep in her bed. She had made no attempt to wash her sister’s blood from her hands and arms. Her fingerprints were on the weapon, an old flat-iron which was used as a doorstop, and she had admitted killing her sister with no more emotion than if she had confessed to leaving her briefly alone.

Kate and Dalgliesh sat for a moment in silence. Kate knew that their thoughts ran in parallel. This discovery was a complication which would influence both their perception of Sharon as a suspect—how could it fail to?—and the conduct of the investigation. She saw it now as fraught with procedural pitfalls. Both victims had been strangled; that fact might prove irrelevant, but it was still a fact. Sharon Bateman—and they would continue to use that name—wouldn’t be living in the community if the authorities hadn’t seen her as no longer a threat. To that extent, wasn’t she entitled to be regarded as one of the suspects, no more likely to be guilty than any of the others? And who else knew? Had Chandler-Powell been told? Had Sharon confided in anyone at the Manor, and, if so, in whom? Had Rhoda Gradwyn suspected Sharon’s identity from the first and was that why she had stayed on? Had she threatened exposure and, if so, had Sharon, or perhaps someone else who knew the truth, taken steps to stop her? And if they arrested someone else, wouldn’t the very presence of a convicted murderer at the Manor influence the Crown Prosecution Service in deciding whether the case would stand up in court? The thoughts seemed to tumble in her mind, but she didn’t voice them. With Dalgliesh she was always careful not to state the obvious.