puzzled when they climbed back in the car a mere twenty minutes later. (‘Have you got any antibacterial handwipes? I feel tainted.’)
‘He was supposed to be about to sing like ye olde proverbial canary, yet it seemed to be the last thing he wanted to do.’
‘Do you think someone got to him? Threatened him?’
‘Maybe,’ Reggie said. ‘Prison’s full of criminals, after all. Do you want to drive or shall I?’
‘You can if you want,’ Ronnie said – generously, given that she spent a lot of time pressing her foot on an imaginary accelerator when slowhand Reggie was at the wheel. It was a two-hour drive here, two hours back. ‘For nothing,’ Ronnie said.
‘Well, some good scenery,’ Reggie said. The moors. The wiley, windy moors. Haworth was thirty miles in the opposite direction. Reggie knew because she had gone there on a day’s outing from uni with Sai, before he opted for a full five-day Indian wedding feast instead of beans on toast and a box set of Mad Men with Reggie. (‘It’s you, not me,’ he said.) There was no such word as ‘wiley’ in the OED (Reggie had looked). You had to admire people who made words up. ‘Have you ever been to Haworth?’
‘No,’ Ronnie said. ‘What is it?’
‘Haworth Parsonage. Where the Brontës lived.’
‘The Brontë sisters?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I suppose that’s who our Bronte’s named after. I’d never thought about it.’
‘I guess so,’ Reggie said. ‘Although there’s a town in Sicily called Bronte, supposedly named after one of the Cyclops, who were said to live beneath Mount Etna. Admiral Nelson was given the title Duke of Bronte by King Ferdinand for helping recover his throne during the Napoleonic period. Our Bronte doesn’t spell her name with a diaeresis, though.’
‘A what?’
‘Diaeresis – the two little dots above the “e”, it’s not an umlaut. Actually it was an affectation applied to the name by their father.’
‘You don’t get out much, do you, Reggie?’
‘Honestly? No. Not any more.’
They had interviewed ‘their’ Bronte – Bronte Finch – at her house in Ilkley, in a lovely lemony drawing room where Bronte had served them tea in nice mugs and individual strawberry tarts from Bettys, which they couldn’t resist despite an unspoken pact to eat or drink nothing while on the job. And she’d bought them specially, so it would have been rude not to have eaten them, they agreed afterwards. She was their patient zero, the first piece in the jigsaw.
There had been squashy sofas and real art on the walls and a lovely old rug (‘Isfahan’) on the oak parquet. A big vase of dark-pink peonies stood in the fireplace. Everything tasteful, everything comfortable. It reminded Reggie of Dr Hunter’s house. It was the kind of home that Reggie would like to have herself one day.
The diaeresis-free Bronte was a small, pretty woman in her forties, mother of three (‘Noah, Tilly and Jacob’), dressed in Lululemon. Her hair was tied up in a messy top-knot and she looked as if she’d just come from the gym. ‘Hot yoga,’ she laughed apologetically as if the idea was faintly ridiculous. A big dark-grey cat was luxuriating on the sofa. ‘Ivan,’ Bronte said. ‘As in the Terrible. Watch him, he’s a biter,’ she added affectionately. She picked the cat up and carried him through to another room, ‘Just in case. He doesn’t like strangers.’
‘Who does?’ Reggie said.
Bronte was a vet. ‘Small animals only. I don’t want to spend my time with an arm up a cow’s arse,’ she laughed again. Her husband, Ben, was an A&E consultant at Leeds General. Between them they treated all creatures great and small. She had a wonderful smile, that was the thing Reggie remembered about her.
Ilkley just made it over the border into West Yorkshire, which was why they had picked up this case. They both liked Bronte immediately. You couldn’t help but like a woman who said ‘cow’s arse’ in a posh accent and who bought you strawberry tarts from Bettys.
The sun coming in at the windows flashed off the modest diamond engagement ring on her thin finger. It made little fragmented rainbows on those lemony walls as she poured the tea. Ronnie and Reggie drank the tea and ate the strawberry tarts and then they got out their notebooks and took dictation from Bronte Finch as she recited the litany of all the men who had abused her during her childhood, starting with her father, Mr Lawson Finch, Crown Court judge.