'Which duty solicitor?' He found her transparency oddly pathetic.
'The one the police provide.'
He considered this during a prolonged and thoughtful silence. 'Would you be referring to duty solicitors at police stations who act on behalf of persons who have no legal representation of their own?'
She nodded.
He sounded genuinely sympathetic. 'With the best will in the world, Miss Lascelles, that is out of the question. These are harsh recessionary times, and you're a privileged young woman, surrounded by people only too willing to watch out for your rights. We'll ask your housemistress to contact a lawyer. She won't hesitate, I'm sure. Apart from anything else, she will want to keep the unpleasantness under wraps so to speak. After all, she does have the school's reputation to think of.'
'Bastard!' she snapped. 'I just won't answer your questions then.'
He manufactured a look of surprise. 'Do I gather you don't want a solicitor after all?'
'No. Yes.' She hugged herself. 'But I'm not saying anything.'
Cooper returned to his seat. 'That's your privilege. But if I don't get any answers from you, then I shall have to ask my questions elsewhere. In my experience, thieves do not confine themselves to stealing from just one person. I wonder what will happen if I call the rest of your house together and ask them en masse if any of their possessions have gone missing in the last year or so. The inference, surely, will be obvious because they know my only connection with the school is you.'
'That's blackmail.'
'Standard police procedure, Miss Lascelles. If a copper can't get his information one way, then he's duty-bound to try another.'
She scowled ferociously. 'I didn't kill her.'
'Have I said you did?'
She couldn't resist answering, it seemed. 'It's what you're thinking. If I was there I must have killed her.'
'She probably died during the early half of the night, between nine o'clock and midnight, say. Were you there then?'
She looked relieved. 'No. I left at five. I had to be back in time for a physics lecture. It's one of my A level subjects and I gave the vote of thanks at the end.'
He took out his pad. 'What time did the lecture start?'
'Seven thirty.'
'And you were there for the start?'
'Yes.'
'How did you manage to do that? You clearly didn't walk thirty miles in two and a half hours.'
'I borrowed a bicycle.'
He looked deeply sceptical. 'What time did you arrive at your grandmother's, Miss Lascelles?'
'I don't know. About three thirty, I suppose.'
'And what time did you leave the school?'
'After lunch.'
'I see,' he said ponderously, 'so you rode thirty miles in one direction in two hours, rested for an hour and a half with your grandmother and then rode thirty miles back again. You must be a very fit young woman. May I have the name of the person whose bicycle you borrowed?' He licked the point of his pencil and held it poised above the page.
'I don't know whose it was. I borrowed it without asking.'
He made a note. 'Shall we call a spade a spade and be done with the pretence? You mean you stole it. Like the earrings and the fifty pounds.'
'I put it back. That's not stealing.'
'Back where?'
'In the bike shed.'
'Good, then you'll be able to identify it for me.'
'I'm not sure. I just took the best one I could find. What difference does it make which bicycle it was?'
'Because you're going to hop on board again and I'm going to follow closely behind you all the way to Fontwell.' He looked amused. 'You see, I don't believe you're capable of riding thirty miles in two hours, Miss Lascelles, but I'm quite happy for you to prove me wrong. Then you can have an hour and a half s rest before you ride back again.'
'You can't do that. That's just fucking-' she cast about for a word '-harassment.'
'Of course I can do it. It's called a reconstruction. You've just put yourself at the scene of a crime on the day the crime was committed, you're a member of the victim's family with easy access to her house and you thought you were going to inherit money from her. All of which puts you high on the list of probable suspects. Either you prove to my satisfaction that you did go by bicycle, or you tell me now how you really got there. Someone drove you, didn't they?'
She sat in a sullen silence, scraping her toe back and forth across the carpet. 'I hitched,' she said suddenly. 'I
