‘Like what?’

‘I think he probably started taking photographs long before he made the 999 call. We’d have been able to see the time of each photograph on the memory card, wouldn’t we?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Or even on a jpeg copy if he’d emailed them.’

‘Well, then it might have occurred to us to compare them to the time of his call. And he’d have some difficult questions to answer. I don’t think our Mr Wade is too technical. He wouldn’t have known how to check the time stamp of each photo, so he deleted the whole lot.’

‘You must have had him worried from the start, Diane.’

‘He was an amateur. Look at how many mistakes he made.’

‘Well, you always said the answer to the Mullen case would be close to home.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Fry. ‘I was thinking about a member of the family. But I suppose your next-door neighbour is pretty close. The Mullens put their trust in him.’

Hitchens stood up from his chair. ‘Let’s go and see the DCI.’

In the DCI’s office, they found that Kessen had just received the results of the latest actions from the incident room – a detailed assessment of Rose Shepherd’s financial circumstances.

‘Miss Shepherd had several savings accounts at different banks,’ he said, ‘but they were practically empty. Unless there are some investments or deposits we haven’t located, the victim’s funds were getting dangerously low.’

‘She doesn’t seem to have had any income, either,’ pointed out Fry.

‘That’s right. Apart from interest on her savings, nothing has been added to any of the accounts as far back as we can go. Since the house purchase, the flow of money has been in one direction – into her current account, where it’s been used to pay bills. We had a quick calculation of her annual expenditure. At her present rate, she couldn’t have survived more than another six months, I reckon.’

Fry took the print-out he offered her. ‘Was she spending heavily?’

‘Not really. Well, her big expenditure was on the house purchase and everything that went with it – solicitor’s fees, and the work she had done, like the gates and the burglar alarms. That must have made a huge hole in her resources. But since then, it’s just been normal living expenses. Council Tax, utilities, telephone bills. Not to mention food and general household expenses. They’ve all been increasing.’

‘And interest rates have been falling.’

‘She must have miscalculated badly, if she thought she could hide herself away in Bain House for the rest of her life.’

‘In any case, she must have been able to see what was going to happen not too far in the future. She was going to run out of money.’

‘Bain House would have had to go, for a start. She could have survived a few years longer if she’d flogged it and bought a terraced property in the city somewhere.’

‘She could have got a job,’ said Fry.

‘Look at the way she lived here,’ said Kessen. ‘Neither of those two options would have seemed possible to Rose Shepherd. She was too frightened of being tracked down.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Kessen coughed. ‘Are we nearly finished here? We need all the manpower we can get at Matlock Bath. Don’t forget we’re still looking for the child. And whoever assaulted DC Cooper, of course.’

‘Thank goodness the Zhivko bombing is C Division’s baby,’ said Hitchens. ‘We couldn’t have coped with that as well. By all accounts, it’s proving a big headache for them.’

‘I’ll send them our sympathy.’

‘What about Brian Mullen?’ asked Fry, turning back to the room. ‘Should we interview him again? It does seem a bit tough on him, so soon after everything else that’s happened.’

‘Leave it for now,’ said Hitchens. ‘I’ll have another try at Tony Donnelly first.’

‘No, look,’ said Donnelly a few minutes later. ‘All I did was nick a car and torch it afterwards. That’s nothing. You just get a ticking off for that. Community service, that sort of thing. It’s no big deal.’

‘You’ve done it before, Mr Donnelly, haven’t you?’

‘Well, yeah. Everybody has. When we were kids, we did it all the time round our way.’

‘But you’re not a kid any more.’

‘No. Well, I had given it up. This was just a one-off.’

‘Found something more lucrative, did you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘I think you do,’ said Hitchens.

Donnelly shook his head.

‘So why this one-off?’

‘Look, it was a favour. Someone wanted a car for a bit, that’s all. A decent car, a four-by-four. I found one for him, and I did it as a favour.’

‘This would be the Shogun?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you saying you didn’t know what the vehicle was being used for?’

Donnelly chuckled. ‘No, of course not. You don’t ask questions like that.’

‘We do.’

‘Yeah, well …’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you, can I? No matter how long you keep me here, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.’

‘We don’t need you to tell us that, Mr Donnelly. We already know. The car you stole was used to commit a murder.’

‘Eh?’

‘A shooting in Foxlow.’

‘No. Well, I heard about that, but you can’t— Well, you can’t, that’s all.’

‘Mr Donnelly, unless you tell us who you did this favour for, you’re our number one suspect right now.’

‘For a murder? You’ve got to be joking.’

‘Not at all, sir. I’ve never been more serious. I suggest you start being more co-operative, or you could be here for a lot longer yet.’

Donnelly stared at him for a long moment, his eyes flickering anxiously as he worked out the odds. Either way, they didn’t look good.

‘He was good to me,’ he said. ‘He gave me a job, and he helped me to set up on my own when things started to go pear-shaped. I owed him a favour, that’s all. He’s a good bloke. I did it as a favour, I don’t know anything else.’

‘Who are you talking about, Mr Donnelly?’

Donnelly took a deep breath before finally committing himself. ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’

Cooper caught up with Fry in the car park, between the security gate and the custody suite. A light drizzle was falling, and Fry seemed to want to get to her car quickly, but he stopped her.

‘Ben? What the heck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at home recuperating.’

‘I don’t need to recuperate. I’m fine.’

He waited for the response he expected, wincing as he remembered what Liz had said to him when he put his jacket on to leave the flat. But, from Fry, it didn’t come.

‘So what do you think you’re going to do here?’ she said.

‘I want to help. Are there any developments?’

Fry brought him up to date on Keith Wade, then told him about Rose Shepherd’s dire financial circumstances.

‘God, she must have been getting desperate,’ said Cooper. ‘There wasn’t even anyone she could turn to for help or advice. She was dealing with that prospect alone.’

Fry leaned against the side of a police van. ‘You know, in those circumstances, I think you’d probably get to a point where you didn’t care any more. You’d be asking yourself what the point of it all was. I mean, how could her life have been worth living? Rose Shepherd was sixty-one – she was facing the prospect of another twenty or thirty years living like this, but with her deliberate isolation becoming more and more difficult to maintain day by day. Personally, I think Rose Shepherd might actually have welcomed her fate, when it came.’

Cooper stared at her, surprised by her sudden burst of empathy. Fry stood beside the van, a slight figure, hardly enough of her to catch the rain.

But Cooper wasn’t at all sure about what she’d just said. He couldn’t feel convinced that Rose Shepherd had welcomed death. In this case, there had been too much of a tendency for people to think they could let the dust settle and return to some kind of normal life, their offences forgiven or forgotten, their past put far behind them.

But dust had a habit of showing tracks if it was left undisturbed too long. And, like the dust gathering in the Mullens’ smoke alarm, it could even mask the approach of danger, when it finally came burning out of the night.