Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

Mrs Weston coloured faintly when she reached the line about fruit flavours. ‘There’s no name on it,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘That’s why we’re showing it to you. In case you recognize it.’

‘You think it might be from Stafford?’ asked Mr Weston. ‘There’s no date on it, either.’

‘Unfortunately not.’

‘I can’t really remember what his writing was like. Susan?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘I mean, I don’t know. It could be.’

‘Did he ever write to you? Might you have something that we could compare it to?’

The couple looked at each other. ‘Have we still got that postcard?’ said Mr Weston.

His wife went to a mahogany dresser and opened a drawer. It was one of those drawers that were always full of things that you never wanted. But Mrs Weston soon located a plastic wallet of the kind that usually contained holiday snaps.

‘I don’t know why we kept it,’ she said. ‘But you can see what sort of man he is.’

Fry studied the postcard. It showed a view on one side of a beach lined with tourist hotels.

‘Hawaii,’ she said. ‘Very nice.’ She turned the card over. It was addressed to the Westons and signed ‘Martin (your former son-in-law)’. The rest of it seemed fairly innocuous — a few lines about how hot the weather was, how luxurious the hotel, how stimulating the nightlife. ‘Spent nearly £2,000 already!’, it said, as if it was a boast.

‘I’m not sure what it tells me,’ said Fry. ‘This holiday was presumably after the divorce.’

‘Not only after the divorce — paid for by the divorce,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘He spent his share of the proceedings from the sale of their house in Derby. He never seemed to want for money, I don’t know why. While Jenny had to spend all of her share and borrow more to buy that little place in Totley, Stafford went on this holiday in Hawaii. The postcard was to rub it in. No other reason.’

‘Apart from Martin Stafford, we’d also want to try to trace any boyfriends that Jenny had recently,’ said Hitchens.

‘We’ve been asked that before,’ said Mr Weston. ‘I gave you some names that we knew. We didn’t know of anyone else. Not recently.’

‘She didn’t talk to us about things like that,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘Not since Stafford.’

‘Not even then,’ said her husband. ‘We had to work it all out for ourselves, what was going on. She didn’t want to say anything against him. Can you believe it?’

‘She was loyal,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘I tried to teach her always to be loyal to her husband. No matter what.’

Mr Weston looked down at the teacups. His wife continued to stare straight ahead, past Fry’s shoulder. It was an aggressive and challenging stare, but it wasn’t directed at Fry at all. It was hitting the wall behind her and ricocheting with unerring accuracy into the back of the seat next to her, passing through Eric Weston’s heart on the way.

‘No matter what,’ repeated Mrs Weston.

Diane Fry was always fascinated by those little secret means of communication that passed between couples without the need for explanation. You had to be very close to someone to be able to do it, very familiar with each other’s thoughts.

‘But she divorced him, in the end,’ said Hitchens.

Mrs Weston nodded. ‘Young women are less tolerant. They have higher expectations of what marriage should be like. They come to a point where they can’t tolerate it any more. You can’t blame them, I suppose. But it isn’t something I could do. My generation was brought up differently. We always believed that we had to grin and bear it, to accept our lot in life. To accept life’s burdens.’

Mr Weston was looking more and more uncomfortable in his seat. He rattled his teacup in its saucer and cleared his throat.

‘Can we take this postcard?’ asked Fry.

‘The writing doesn’t look anything like the note,’ said Mrs Weston.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ admitted Fry.

‘Well, that’s that, then.’

Back in the car, Diane Fry called in for an update on the other lines of enquiry. The teams canvassing neighbours in Totley had found someone who remembered a man looking for Jenny two weeks’ previously, asking for her by name. The man was described as being of medium height and ordinary. He had been quite respectably dressed, and had spoken in a local accent. Very useful.

A second neighbour, who lived nearly opposite Jenny’s house in The Quadrant, recalled a strange car parked in the road one night. A man had been sitting in it, but he had driven off at about the time that Jenny had left her house.

A third witness reported a light-coloured van, possibly an old Ford Transit or something similar, which had passed slowly along the road twice. At the time, the neighbour had thought it might be gypsies — ‘totters’, he called them — looking for scrap, or anything they could steal.

Several neighbours recalled female visitors to Jenny’s home, including a girl with dark dreadlocks who had attracted particular attention in The Quadrant for a while. Dreadlocks were rare in Totley.

All the fragments of information had been passed to the officers interviewing Jenny’s colleagues at Global Assurance. But none of the colleagues could remember Jenny ever complaining of being harassed by a disgruntled boyfriend. If it had been her ex-husband trying to get back in touch, Jenny had not confided the fact to anyone. But the incident room staff would put the information into the HOLMES system. Correlations might be thrown up. Just one detail could send the whole enquiry in a new direction.

DI Hitchens had been on the mobile phone to the DCI back at Divisional Headquarters in West Street. When he finished the call, Hitchens turned to Fry and told her what they wanted her to do next.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she said. But he wasn’t.

Mark Roper rattled a fork against the plastic bowl. Three cats appeared from the shrubbery at the end of the garden — a grey one and two tabbies. They ran with their tails in the air and brushed themselves against Mark’s legs until he put their bowls on the ground and they began to gnaw at their chunks of meat.

While they ate, Mark went to clean out the bedding for the rabbits and freshen the water in their cages. The rabbits stared at him through the mesh, twitching their noses as they sniffed his familiar smell. For a while, Mark sat on an upturned milk crate to watch the cats feed.

Normally, he would have been at work, but he had been told to take a day off. He couldn’t understand what they expected him to do at home, except to sit and think, to relive the moment he had found the body of the murdered woman, and to wonder about the events that had led up to her death among the Nine Virgins. Mark would have much preferred to be with Owen, to be busy with jobs that would take his mind off things. But he hadn’t wanted to argue, in case they thought his reaction was strange.

He could think of nothing worse than sitting in the house all day, as some people did. He soon became claustrophobic and restless, and angry at the untidiness — the dirty clothes draped over chairs, the empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays left on the floor.

In any case, the house contained nothing of his father any more. His clothes had gone, and so had his books, his walking stick and his stuffed Tawny Owl. The man who lived with Mark’s mother now had removed every remaining trace of her husband from the house. But he had never thought to bother with the garden. Here, Mark recognized every item that his father had collected over the years — every lump of wood, and every stone. This milk crate was one that his father had found by the roadside and had thought might be useful one day. Mark had helped his father make these rabbit cages; the frames still bore the marks made by a saw and a plane held in his father’s hands. Their relationship still lived on in these little things. These, and the nightmares that Mark suffered now and then, when he would wake up in the night, calling for his dad like a child.