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Tabitha made a small involuntary noise, somewhere between a moan and a sigh. She’d finally realised that she was on that list of people who might be held responsible. ‘Oh God…’ she said. ‘Am I…? Do I…? Should I have a lawyer?’

Hayley looked at Tabitha carefully. ‘Why do you think you need a lawyer?’ she said.

‘You just said that someone who handled the gun is a murderer.’ Julia could hear the panic in Tabitha’s voice. She couldn’t quite believe what Hayley seemed to be implying.

‘Did you load the gun, Tabitha?’

‘No!’

‘Did you deliberately write a play that would end with Graham Powell being shot?’ Hayley’s voice was calm; conversational, even.

‘Roger did the casting, not me,’ said Tabitha. ‘You can’t think that I killed someone, Hayley.’

Hayley sighed. ‘No, I don’t really think so, Tabitha,’ she said. ‘But just because you and Julia are friends of mine doesn’t mean I can rule you out without following due process. It’s my job. ’

Hayley spoke in a reassuring tone. Tabitha nodded and took a few steady breaths.

‘That means getting a fuller statement from you both, as we discussed, and likewise from Oscar. You will just tell us what you know, as fully as you can, and I hope we’ll be able to discount you both as suspects.’

‘What about Roger Grave?’ Julia blurted out. She had had her run-ins with the man, but she didn’t like the thought of him facing a charge.

‘I can’t discuss that with you, Julia. You know that.’

‘Of course. It’s just that Roger said he checked. It must have been…Well, I don’t know what happened. I’m just saying that he…’

‘If Roger Grave says he checked for a bullet, he checked for a bullet,’ said Hayley Gibson snappily, having seemingly forgotten that not a moment ago she had said she couldn’t discuss the matter with Julia. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I need to take down Tabitha’s official statement, and then yours, Julia.’

‘Oh, yes. Of course. Tabitha, I’ll wait for you outside.’

Julia sat on the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting area. To avoid the unwelcoming gaze of Cherise, the desk sergeant, she took out her phone and checked for messages. Even so, she could feel the judgement emanating from Cherise. She always regarded Julia with a tinge of disapproval. She seemed to think – not without some justification, it had to be said – that Julia interfered in matters that were not her business. Police business, to be specific.

Julia was pleased to see a message from Sean, who was at a petrol station just outside London, notifying her of his safe progress. It ended with a hug emoji, a flower emoji, and three hearts, an unusually extensive selection of images. Sean was generally a single x chap. Julia stared at them, wondering what she could deduce from this. After some moments of staring, she deduced that she was a sixty-something woman in a long- standing and satisfying adult relationship, not a hapless twelve-year-old with her first flirtation, and she would give no more attention to deciphering tiny cartoon images on a phone.

She closed the message and opened Wordle, which she usually did in a pleasant, leisurely moment over her morning tea. That, of course, was when she didn’t have two separate crises needing her attention at daybreak.

She got two letters in the right place on her first guess – STARE. The A in the middle, and the E at the end. It seemed like a good, solid start, but she knew from experience that it was anything but. With this configuration, it would be nothing more than chance, from here on out. There was no strategy to be employed. She would be sticking random consonants into the grid until one of them happened to be in the right place. Which is exactly what happened until she got the word FLAKE on her fifth try. She closed the app, dissatisfied, just as Tabitha emerged from the door next to the front desk.

‘All okay?’ Julia asked.

Her friend nodded. She looked tired, but calm. ‘I can only tell her what I know. And that’s what I did.’

‘If you can wait for me to be done, I’ll drive you home.’

‘I’d like that, thank you.’

Julia’s formal statement to Hayley was straightforward, and covered nothing that she hadn’t already told her. Yet she felt quite exhausted when it was over, and when she walked out of Hayley’s office, she saw that Tabitha looked pale.

‘And thank you for waiting, Tabitha. I feel quite exhausted.’

Tabitha nodded. ‘Me too. The sadness and the stress, I suppose. And low blood sugar. I failed to have breakfast, other than a cuppa.’

‘Poor you, you must be weak as a kitten! You must eat something as soon as you get home.’

‘I will have a nice piece of toast. There’s not much else in the house. I’d planned to shop this morning. I was going to stock up for the week and drop something to Jane, poor woman. I’ll go out later once I’ve had a rest.’

The two women climbed into the car and drove for a few minutes, before Tabitha’s stomach gave an actual, audible growl. They couldn’t help but laugh.

As the growl faded, a bakery appeared in the windscreen like a sign. Well, it was an actual sign that read Kneady , but also, a sign that they should stop and buy baked goods.

‘Shall we?’ asked Julia, already indicating her intention to turn into a parking space right outside the little shop, with its striped awning over the glass front door. ‘They do a good pie.’

‘These are straight out of the oven,’ said the baker, coming through from the back at the sound of their arrival. She held a tray of steaming golden pies in her oven mitts. ‘Lamb, pea and mint, all free-range and organic, and made by my own fair hand.’

Tabitha didn’t have to resort to ‘a nice piece of toast’ after all. No convincing was needed once the buttery smell of hot pastry reached their nostrils. They asked for one each.

‘My treat,’ said Tabitha.

‘If you fancy something sweet, we have a cinnamon raisin loaf today.’

It looked magnificent, its top glazed golden and shiny, studded with fruit.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t,’ said Tabitha, sadly. ‘Trying to cut back on the sweet things.’

The two women silently contemplated those pesky five pounds. ‘Oh, I know,’ Tabitha’s voice lifted. ‘I’ll get that for Jane. It’ll be a nice treat, and handy when she has visitors. Do you mind if we deliver it to her on the way home, Julia?’

Jane and Graham Powell’s house – Jane’s house now, presumably – was in a row of four golden sandstone cottages, all identical, but for the colours of their painted doors and the state of their gardens. Despite the Powells having moved to the cottage quite recently, Jane’s garden more than held its own. It was small, but lush and lovingly tended, and accommodated a number of small decorative items – a ceramic birdbath already hosting a ceramic bird, a white-painted arch over which grew a climbing rose, with a ceramic hedgehog and frog peeking from the undergrowth. Julia imagined Jane and Graham drinking their morning coffee at the small, round, metal table, and surveying their pretty garden. She felt horribly sad for the new widow, who would now be drinking her coffee alone.

They had not intended to stay and visit but Jane ushered them in as soon as she opened the door. ‘I’d like the company, really I would,’ she said, brushing away their objections. She did seem genuinely eager for them to stay, even insistent. They followed her into a neat little kitchen, its centre table already holding a quiche and two iced cakes, and a number of bunches of flowers pushed into an ice bucket. Clearly, the Berrywick crisis cavalry had been coming over in full force.

‘You can freeze it,’ Tabitha said, handing over the raisin bread.

‘Now, Jane,’ said Julia. ‘Would you like me to arrange those flowers in a vase for you?’

‘I’d be so grateful. I’ve been meaning to do it and feeling bad about them sitting there, but somehow I just couldn’t…’

‘Of course not. You’re grieving. Point me to the vases, and I’ll get them looking nice.’

Jane found a couple of vases and a pair of scissors for Julia, then put the kettle on and pottered around with the tea things. ‘How is Hannah?’ asked Tabitha.

‘The poor girl is devastated. She was so close to her dad. Lucky she has the baby to keep her occupied, and her husband, Ahmed, is ever so nice, and ever so helpful. A properly modern fellow. Cooks, cleans, sees to the baby. They asked me to stay the night with them but I came home. I want to be in my own space.’

‘I can imagine. And if you need anything, or just a chat…’ Julia said, snipping the ends off a bunch of roses.

‘Thank you. I just want to know what happened. The accident, you know. I can’t imagine how the gun…’ She shook her head, whether in confusion or denial was unclear. ‘Did you see Oscar, when you were at the police station?’

‘We did, briefly. He was coming out as we went in.’

‘How is he?’ Jane took one teacup from the shelf. Her hands were trembling, making the cup rattle slightly against the saucer. She turned and lowered it carefully onto the table. She reached up for a second cup.

‘He looked pretty shaky. He asked after you, too. He was worried about you.’

Jane nodded sadly as she put the cup down with a tiny rattle. Her movements were so slow it looked almost as if she was underwater.

‘We’ve known each other a long time, me and Oscar. We were at school together.’

‘Oh, yes, Oscar said so. That’s a very long friendship,’ said Tabitha. It would be over thirty years, maybe even forty, Julia thought, doing the quick maths in her head.

‘It is. Very long and…’ Jane stopped halfway to fetching the third cup from the shelf. She turned to Julia. ‘It wasn’t his fault, what happened. It was an accident. No one’s to blame, I suppose.’

This was not DI Gibson’s view. But it seemed Jane wasn’t aware of that. Hayley must not have told her.

‘Oscar must feel awful,’ Jane continued. ‘Especially because…’

Julia knew that pause, that significant pause that meant something difficult was coming. She knew to wait quietly, calmly, a stem in one hand and the scissors in the other. Any sudden movement could spook the speaker.

‘Because he’s so very fond of me,’ Jane said, continuing the slow turn and the stretch of her arm towards the third cup. ‘We had a real connection, from the old days, you know. At one time, he hoped…But I chose Graham. That’s what it comes down to in the end, doesn’t it? I loved Graham, I chose him. And at the end, we all had to live with that, whether it was the right choice or not.’ Jane frowned, as if pondering the choice even now. ‘And Oscar has been an enormous support to me recently. I know he’ll be devastated to have caused Graham’s death, even though it’s not his fault. Nobody would have wanted that. I have no idea how…’

But Jane couldn’t keep speaking. Her eyes clouded with tears, and the cup slipped from her hands and shattered noisily on the flagstone floor.