‘Do you want to swap? I’ll go check out the inner workings of the nutters and you can listen to the lurid confessions of the circus folk.’ Anything to help me figure out what was going on in the head of the nutter who took it upon himself to violently kill and dump a young woman in a river. The vision of Rose-Marie, face down in the Leith popped into my head and my body responded with its obligatory shudder.

‘Oh, Sam, someone walk on your grave?’ Aunty Jude wandered into the kitchen, a vision of meticulous style and grooming. I wish my family carried the gene responsible for that degree of elegance.

‘No, not mine,’ I said, as I sorted out an industrial-size coffee, the dreaded instant variety, not the flash stuff. ‘You’re looking lovely, where are you off to today?’

The responding bashful smile showed she wasn’t immune to the admiration. ‘I’m doing my stint at the hospice this morning. And, thank you for the compliment. She’s such a nice girl, isn’t she, Maggie? You can stay in our home as long as you like.’ Jude had filled her days up admirably since the girls had flown for foreign shores, leaving a corresponding twin-shaped hole in her life. There was the volunteering at the hospice, she delivered Meals on Wheels once a week in the Mercedes and she’d become heavily involved with Altrusa, the community service organisation populated by already overworked professional and business women. She was also a lady who lunched and seemed to have an inordinate number of friends on the wine-and-dine or coffee-and-catch-up circuit.

‘Sam met up with a tall, handsome stranger at the bar last night,’ Maggie said, with a positively salacious tone.

‘Ooh, Sam, tell me more. This sounds good,’ Aunty Jude said.

‘Don’t believe a word she says. Anyway, he wasn’t a stranger.’

‘But he was handsome?’

‘Well, kind of.’ Paul Frost seemed to think he was, so that was all that mattered. ‘One of the Gore guys was up, that was all, and Maggie’s being a stirrer. She can’t comment because she was being rather chatty with a few of my colleagues, if I recall correctly. A number of them were giving her the eye.’

‘Maggie? It’s about time you had a boyfriend again; pretty girl like you shouldn’t be alone.’ A touch of pink infused Maggie’s face. I was pleased to see that aunts could be just as embarrassing as mothers. ‘I’m sure Sam’s workmates are nice young men. When do we get to meet one?’

‘Not in a million years. Uh-uh, not ever,’ Maggie said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t do policemen.’

‘Who do you do, then, Maggs?’ Aunty Jude asked with a mischievous glint.

Maggie’s feigned shock and that question – delivered in Aunty Jude’s posh voice – made me laugh, unfortunately with a snort.