A corridor led down the length of the house with doors leading off. Vera opened them one by one. The living room was much as Vera had seen it on her previous visit. Tidy. She continued. To the left a big bedroom, bed made, a couple of garments folded on a chair, a wicker laundry basket, its contents waiting to be put away. A faint scent of talcum powder and washing powder. Connie’s smell. The woman had slept there the night before.
Next to it a bathroom, empty. Then a smaller bedroom, cold, impersonal, seldom used. At the end of the corridor was a large kitchen, an extension built out into the garden, with a view over the village and across the valley to the forest beyond. It seemed clear that this was where Connie spent most of her time. A couple of easy chairs had been placed by the window. Over the hills on the horizon more clouds were gathering and the light was turning grey.
This was the last room left to search and Vera paused on the threshold before walking in. A Tupperware box of muesli stood on the table, next to a bowl, a tub of yoghurt, a supermarket container of blueberries. Of course, Constance would be a woman who went for a healthy breakfast. But the bowl and the spoon were clean. Constance had prepared her breakfast but not eaten it. A cafetière stood on the workbench close to the kettle. Coffee had been spooned into the glass jug, but no water had been added.
Vera saw these details from the doorway. Again, she told herself that she was being ridiculous, but she couldn’t help considering this as a crime scene. In her head, she was talking to the woman. Oh, Connie, if you’d told me everything you knew, everything you suspected, when I drank your tea and ate your biscuits, would you still be here, eating oats and fruit, drinking your upmarket coffee?
She couldn’t see the whole room from where she stood and now she moved in, so she could see the floor beyond the counter. In her head she’d pictured another body, more blood, bone and brain spilled onto the quarry-tiled floor, a confident older woman reduced to an interesting corpse for Paul Keating to pick over. In the end there was nothing. The room was empty. She was turning back to the rest of the house when a noise made her start and sent a shot of adrenaline through her body, but when she turned it was the big tabby pushing through the cat flap in the kitchen door. There was food for it in a bowl on the floor.
Vera was flooded with relief, a physical sensation that felt like drowning. Then came anticlimax, then suspicion. What had sent Constance Browne hurrying away from home before she’d eaten breakfast? Who had she been running away from? A killer who thought she knew too much, or the team who were investigating Lorna’s death?
Chapter Twenty-One
IT WAS MONDAY MORNING AND JULIET thought Brockburn was returning to a semblance of normality. A team of officers was still searching the grounds, but they’d moved further away from the house now and seemed less intrusive. Mark had left early for Newcastle and his work at the theatre. Sometimes he went to the city on Sunday evening and slept in the flat he rented on the quayside, but this week she’d persuaded him to stay the night at Brockburn and leave first thing on Monday. She’d needed his company. By the time they’d returned after church and had lunch with the Charltons, Dorothy had retreated to the cottage, and Juliet had thought she couldn’t bear an evening on her own with Harriet. Church and lunch had been ordeal enough.
In the end, she and Mark had spent the evening in Dorothy’s cottage, babysitting Duncan while the couple went to a party at the Heslops’ place. With all the drama, Juliet had quite forgotten she’d promised to look after the boy. She and Mark had passed a peaceful evening, enjoying the warmth and the quiet of the cottage, sharing a bottle of Dorothy’s wine. Once, Juliet had gone into Duncan’s room to breathe in the scent of him, to stare at him in the dim light. It had been a restful evening after a fraught and unpleasant day.
Mark didn’t have a religious bone in his body, but he always rather enjoyed the ritual of attendance at church in Kirkhill. Juliet thought it made him feel grand. He had images in his head of the royal family, turning out from Balmoral or Sandringham to spend an hour worshipping with the common people. But perhaps that was doing him an injustice – he would have hated to be considered that kind of snob – and it was the ritual he liked. Church was theatre of a kind too. He had a beautiful tenor voice and he joined in the hymns and the responses with great gusto. After the service, the weather had been too bad to stand talking in the churchyard, so there’d been an excuse to run straight back to the car, without having to discuss the drama at Brockburn with the other parishioners.
Sunday lunch with the Charltons had an element of ritual too. It had been a fixture every month since Crispin’s death. Margaret Charlton was Harriet’s second cousin, so it was considered
