gave the crystals a sharp scrutiny and raised his eyebrows.
‘Well, miss,’ he said. ‘Unofficially I can tell you that if you hadn’t drunk that whiskey you’d have been on the right side. It isn’t much over, even now.’
‘I’m not really surprised,’ she said, and that at least was true.
‘You’d be amazed the number of people who try to drink before we test them.’
‘Do they really?’ She sounded tired, and as if evasive tactics had never come into her orbit. The police packed up their notes and their bottle kit, gave me a lecture about letting animals get loose, and in their own good time went away.
Sophie Randolph gave me the beginnings of a smile.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
4
She slept in my bed and I slept in Crispin’s, and Crispin slept on, unknowing, on the sofa.
She had been stitched up neatly by the doctor but had been more concerned that he should take care of her dress. She had insisted that he unpick the seam of her sleeve rather than rip the material to get to her wound, and I had smiled at the meticulous way he had snipped through the tiny threads to please her.
‘My arm will mend itself,’ she explained. ‘But the dress won’t, and it was expensive.’
The cut, once revealed, had been jagged and deep, with fragments of glass embedded. She watched with interest while he anaesthetised it locally and worked on the repairs, and by the end I was wondering just what it would take to smash up such practised self-command.
The morning found her pale and shaky but still basically unruffled. I had been going to tell her to stay in bed but when I came in at eight thirty after feeding and mucking out the lodgers she was already down in the kitchen. Sitting at the table, wearing my dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. There were dark smudges round her eyes and most of the thirty-two years were showing in her skin. I thought that very probably her bandaged arm was hurting.
She looked up calmly when I came in.
‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Like some coffee?’
‘Very much.’
I made it in the filter pot. ‘I was going to bring it to you upstairs,’ I said.
‘I didn’t sleep too well.’
‘Not madly surprising.’
‘I heard you out in the yard. Saw you from the window, and thought I might as well come down.’
‘How about some toast?’ I asked.
She said yes to the toast and yes also to three strips of crispy bacon to go with it. While I cooked she looked round the workmanlike kitchen and finally asked the hovering question. ‘Are you married?’
‘Divorced.’
‘Some years ago, I would guess.’
I grinned. ‘Quite right.’ Married, repented, divorced, and in no hurry to make another mistake.
‘Can you lend me any clothes I won’t look ridiculous in?’
‘Oh… a jersey. Jeans. Would that do?’
‘Lovely with silver shoes,’ she said.
I sat down beside her to drink my coffee. She had a face more pleasant than positively beautiful, a matter of colouring and expression more than bone structure. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were brownish blonde, eyes hazel, mouth softly pink without lipstick.
Her composure, I began to understand, was not aggressive. It was just that she gave no one any chance to patronise or diminish her because she was female. Understandable if some men didn’t like it. But her colleagues, I thought, must find it restful.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘about my horse.’
‘So you damn well ought to be.’ But there was none of the rancour she would have been entitled to.
‘What can I do to make amends?’
‘Are you offering a chauffeur service?’
‘By all means,’ I said.
She munched the toast and bacon. ‘Well… I’ll need to see about getting my car towed away. What’s left of it. Then I’d be grateful if you could drive me to Gatwick Airport.’
‘Do you work there, then?’ I asked, surprised.
‘No. At Heathrow. But I can hire a car at Gatwick. Special discount… goes with the job.’
She was using her right hand to cut the toast with, and I saw her wince.
‘Do you have to work today?’ I asked.
‘Nothing wrong with my voice,’ she said. ‘But probably not. I’m on stand-by from four this afternoon for twelve hours. That means I just have to be home in my fiat, ready to take over at an hour’s notice in case anyone is ill or doesn’t turn up.’
‘And what are the chances?’
‘Of working? Not high. Most stand-bys are just a bore.’
She drank her coffee left handed.
‘And you?’ she asked. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a