WOMAN SOUGHT IN HUNGRY HILL MURDER

Surrey CID today issued a description of a woman they intend to question in relation to the murder of Surrey farmer Mr Geoffrey Hollis (68) from Hungry Hill Lane, near Ockham. The woman is 6ft. 1in. tall, broad-shouldered and slim, with a fresh complexion and brown hair. She was last seen wearing a fawn drape coat, a tan blouse and black wool skirt. Surrey CID declared the woman to be dangerous and they urged the public not to approach her.

When she’d collected the newspaper from the doorstep, there’d been no police in sight. Mr Fish believed the CID had changed the focus of their investigation: they’d found nothing at the house and had diverted all their resources to finding Joyce. Well, it had hardly been a cause for celebration, but Arthur had said, ‘It’s all right to be relieved, you know,’ and kissed her forehead.

She’d felt overwhelmed with tiredness – they all had – but the matter of the Proctor house was yet to be resolved. They’d had to delegate the supervision of the build to Vernon Quinn, who’d sent them reports each week and kept in touch over the phone. But he wasn’t as attuned to defects as her husband was and so important things had gone unnoticed. By the time they’d made it out to Sunbury, at last, the damage had been done. They’d been so conscious of the silence in the car and Charlie’s sheer dejection. It had been a struggle to cajole him from his bedroom before noon. She’d begun to nag at him to eat his meals, to wear clean clothes, to shave. His forlornness had become a kind of bleakness. They couldn’t interest him in getting back to work: he wouldn’t step into the draughting room at all, refused to do a thing except for chores about the farm or smoke his cigarettes. No matter what they’d asked of him, he’d bridled at it. All the way to Sunbury, he hadn’t said a word. Then, on the site, he’d traipsed round in a pall of his own thoughts. They’d never seen him so uninterested or detached, and Arthur had suggested that he go and wait for them inside the car. When they’d returned to him, he’d been asleep on the back seat, wearing his sister’s cardigan.

Today, the new contractor’s works were ready for inspection. She was driving back from Borough Green with visions of the Proctor house in perfect order. It had been their first commission, and their only one to date. They’d formed their practice on the basis of it. She could still remember every lunch and dinner it had taken to convince the Proctors to believe in them, two architects with no established reputation, no experience. She’d been the one who’d nurtured that relationship from the beginning, made it bloom into an opportunity.

She wanted to believe that when she got to Sunbury, it would be there gleaming on the slope: as well constructed as it was conceived. The beauty of the house, she’d always thought, was in the way her husband had positioned it within the site, so that the mitred edge of the enormous downstairs window was the first thing to be seen as you drove up the track. You could look right through the open chamber of the living room and glimpse the willows just beyond the terrace at the rear. And if it passed today’s inspection, maybe something of that beauty would be salvaged. But she expected it was gone for good. The house had been a failure of their execution, not their vision. She was certain that, in twenty years from now, she’d still be taking roads that circumvented Sunbury, and telling people when they asked her, Yes, that’s one of ours, but there’s a lot more to it …