you know.’
Grice gave her a tentative smile, but Fry refused to acknowledge the joke.
‘But you said Miss Shepherd didn’t like you going upstairs. How did you get into the bedrooms without her noticing?’
‘I was mending a joint on a pipe in the kitchen, and I told her I had to turn off the water at the stopcock in the bathroom. She didn’t know any better, you see.’
‘Where was Miss Shepherd while you were nosing around in the bedrooms?’
‘She was downstairs, in her sitting room. She went in there to be away from me, I suppose. So I didn’t go in the front bedroom, because I thought she might hear my footsteps.’
‘And did you find anything interesting to tell your sister?’
‘Not really. Well, nothing at all, as a matter of fact. It was boring.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘So I had to make some stuff up.’
‘Hold on — you made things up about Miss Shepherd to tell your sister?’
‘Well, yes. Otherwise she would have kept pestering me. I had to get her off my back.’
‘And no doubt your sister would have spread this false information around her friends in Foxlow?’
‘That was the general idea. I didn’t think there’d be any harm in it. None of the stuff was ever likely to get back to Miss Shepherd herself, because she didn’t talk to anyone in the village. See what I mean? So it was harmless.’
Fry caught her breath. ‘What false information did you make up, Mr Grice?’
‘I can’t remember now.’
‘I can’t believe it was anything too complicated. You don’t have the imagination.’
He glowered at her. ‘I don’t know. It was just what came to mind.’
‘Let me have a guess, then. Did you tell your sister Miss Shepherd had a hidden safe in the house where she kept all her valuables?’
Grice pulled his face. ‘Yes, probably.’
‘Did you tell your sister Miss Shepherd was a retired teacher from Scotland?’
‘Yes, I think so. I couldn’t really tell — ’
‘And, Mr Grice, this is very important — did you tell your sister that Rose Shepherd had a friend called Dougie in Glasgow?’
Eric Grice nodded slowly, but said nothing.
Fry sat back. ‘Well, sir, for a man who thought he wasn’t doing any harm, you’ve certainly wasted a lot of people’s time.’
‘God damn the man,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘I could cheerfully strangle him with his own drill cord.’
‘At least he’s talking now. I’ve got someone taking a statement from him, and we’ll speak to his sister, too, to see if their accounts tally. But I believe he’s telling us the truth now.’
‘Meanwhile, it’s back to square one in our picture of Rose Shepherd. When we ignore all the stuff that Grice made up to keep the gossips happy, the information we have about her now amounts to what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It can’t do.’
‘Sweet FA, if you prefer.’
‘No, no. We do have some verifiable facts. We’ve
‘If you say so, sir.’
Hitchens looked at the board, scrubbed off some of the details and studied what was left. ‘She’s a British passport holder, born in London. And we’ve got her age — she was born in 1944.’
‘A wartime baby.’
‘Yes. Maybe her parents were killed in the Blitz or something.’
‘I thought we were looking at the verifiable facts.’
‘OK. Well, we’ve got her name, age, place of birth. And her physical details — height, weight, hair colour. She moved to Foxlow ten months ago, and she came here from London. She had plenty of funds, because Bain House wasn’t cheap, and she was a cash buyer.’
‘And apart from that …?’
Hitchens tilted his head on one side to look at the photograph of the victim from a different angle. It didn’t seem to tell him anything new.
‘That’s about it,’ he said. ‘We’re no nearer to filling in her past history. Or to tracing any personal contacts, now the famous Dougie from Glasgow has proved mythical.’
‘Have we talked to everyone in her address book?’
‘Almost everyone. One or two companies that are listed have gone out of business. The odd thing is that her book only dates from the day she moved into Bain House. Apart from the solicitor and the estate agent, nobody we’ve spoken to had any contact with her before November last year.’
‘Did any of these individuals detect an accent?’
‘Only those who were offered a leading question by the officer interviewing them. In other words, if they were asked whether Miss Shepherd had a Scottish accent, they agreed she might have done. Otherwise, they had no suggestions to offer.’
‘Grice has a lot to answer for.’
‘Agreed. But I don’t think it would make much difference in this case. None of them could really agree on her appearance or manner either. One said Miss Shepherd had a nice smile, another said she was very reserved and never smiled at all. We’ve had a lot of different estimates of her age, too. You’d hardly think they’d met the same person.’
‘Well, a harmless middle-aged woman — who’d take much notice of her, unless she did something to draw attention to herself?’
‘And she didn’t do that.’
Hitchens spun round and looked at Fry. ‘A harmless middle-aged woman that no one takes any notice of. Do you think you’ll end up like that one day, Diane?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Why not? We all get middle-aged, don’t we?’
‘The key word is “harmless”,’ said Fry.
The DI laughed. ‘You’re right. I can’t see anyone not noticing you, no matter how old you get.’
‘Did we get anything from her contacts list?’
‘Well, her dentist can tell us that Rose Shepherd had a few previous fillings. Her GP prescribed her Nitrazepam for her sleeping problems. And the garage can tell us what the emissions were like on her Volvo. Pick the bones out of that, if you can.’
‘Why did she have trouble sleeping, I wonder?’
‘Who can say?’
‘Well, at least we have a confirmation of her ID from the dental records. We don’t have to wait for the GP to get back.’
Hitchens opened the file. ‘One thing we did find in the house was the receipt for her car. It was bought from a Volvo dealer in Chesterfield and delivered to Bain House a few days after Miss Shepherd moved in. The receipt gives the recorded mileage at the time of sale, and we checked it against the current reading. She did about three hundred miles in a year. She was the proverbial careful lady owner.’
‘My God, she hardly went anywhere,’ said Fry.
‘She had no one to visit, did she?’
‘Apparently not.’
