A Persian cat slunk into the room and hopped silently onto Yellich’s lap.

‘That means he likes you,’ Mrs Richardson smiled. She spoke with a strong Irish accent. ‘Not all our visitors get that treatment. I tend to let my animals do my thinking for me. I’ve found over the years that if they like someone then that person is all right, and they’ve never been proved wrong. Female intuition is nothing compared to animal instinct. But if she annoys you, lift her off.’

‘She doesn’t bother me.’ Yellich stroked the cat’s ears and back. The beast began to purr softly. He pondered that cats are nice creatures unless you happen to be a mouse. Your view depends on your standpoint. Mrs Richardson, with her pleasant manner and very well-appointed home, with framed black and white photographs of old Ireland - a man on a cycle, on an endless rural track, another which could be anywhere but was entitled ‘Phoenix Park 1912’ - may well be a nice woman, unless you were her victim. Then he said, ‘No point in denying it. What do you mean?’

Colleen Richardson reached for a cigarette from a cigarette box which was far too elaborately designed for Yellich’s taste, and lit it with a cigarette lighter of the type which, he thought, had gone out of fashion many years earlier. A huge paperweight of a contraption, conventional mechanism at the top but a body as big as an orange, and the colour of same.

‘No point in denying it. He hated Williams. I’ve never known two things about my husband. I’ve never known any reason to fear him, and I’ve never known him capable of hate. The Williamses came into our lives and I knew both. Reckon after twenty-something years of marriage, I finally knew my husband. But they say that you never really know the person you live with, either they keep changing so they’re one step ahead of you, or you keep discovering something new about them. But Michael didn’t kill them.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know what I just said, but I do know my husband well enough to know that he didn’t kill them. He’s got a terrible temper, but if he was violent I would have seen that by now, surely to God. I mean, he’s been in a few pub fights when he’s been too much in the black stuff and when he was a youth, but nothing since and nothing when he’s been sober.’

She inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. ‘To think that when I went away to Ireland I thought things couldn’t be worse. Michael’s business in the bog, us having to sell this house to pay his crew and supplies, and this, the home we’d worked so hard for…Michael built these houses, did you know?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Two streets, for young or junior professional people, he picked out a corner plot for this house. Extra bit of land, you see…so I went to see my old father in Galway, told him things couldn’t get worse and sure, when I came back he’s become a murder suspect. Just shows, when you think you’re on the bottom, when you think it can’t get any worse, you get pushed down even further…I mean, in the name of the Holy Mother, where is the justice in that? Is there justice in the world, let me ask you that?’

‘We haven’t charged your husband with anything, Mrs Richardson.’

‘Being a suspect is bad enough. Thank the Almighty our children are away so they don’t see this.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Leeds. They’re flapping their wings, their father taught them the trade, so they’ve moved away. Richardson Brothers, Builders, Leeds. Sure, I can see Michael asking them for a job. You’ll be making a case against Michael?’

‘No. That’s old-fashioned police thinking.’ Yellich continued to stroke the cat and then stopped and lifted the beast from his lap. It occurred to him that by favouring Mrs Richardson’s pet he was blurring professional boundaries. The cat arched its back in indignation and curled up on the deep pile carpet in front of the hearth into which Yellich noted that Mrs Richardson was in the habit of throwing her cigarette butts. ‘We used to do that. Identify a suspect, try to build a case against him, if we could we’d run with it. Now we tie.’

‘Tie?’

‘TIE—Trace. Interview. Eliminate. Cast a wide net, trace anybody and everybody who has some connection with the crime, interview them, and if we can’t eliminate them we…look at them a little more closely.’

‘And Michael?’

‘He hasn’t been eliminated.’

‘So he’s a suspect?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the name…he lost more fights than he won. Often he went down to men half his size. We’re ruined. Finished. Now this…’

‘So your husband’s business is finished?’

‘Aye. So he says. A couple of little jobs, but that won’t pay the bills. So the house, our home, it’ll have to be sold. We came with nothing, we’ll go with nothing.’

‘He could sell the house he built for Max Williams?’

‘Not at a profit. And anyway, the house is just too fancy, a lot of fixtures and fittings, sunken baths and gold-plated taps. It’ll not sell well in this part of England. In the south, maybe, but the north of England, those sort of knick-knacks just are not to folks’ taste. He could sell it, to be sure, but at such a loss…Michael thinks we’ll be better off selling this house, but we want this house, not Williams’s fairy-tale design. See, the upshot is that we’re finished and that’s down to Williams.’

‘It’s like your husband blundered into something.’

‘That’s putting it mildly.’ Colleen Richardson took one last deep drag on the half-smoked nail and flicked the still burning butt into the fire grate where it smouldered harmlessly into extinction. ‘See, Williams has a…had a reputation in the Vale for being a good touch.’

‘A good touch?’

‘For money.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Aye, so he was. A lot of businesses have been started up and kept going in the Vale over the last ten years or so using Williams’s money as seed money. His name is well-known by businessmen in the Vale. See, that’s why Michael went ahead and built the house, Williams’s reputation, his money supply was endless. Williams must have known what he was doing, must have to make money like he could throw it around. It was like he was making the stuff…Michael said he bought into companies when they were new, helped them off the ground, rode piggyback and then sold his share, or his shares, when they were up and running with full order books. Reckon that’s how Michael got in so deeply, based on Williams’s reputation.’

‘Reckon that’s it. Tell me, did your husband ever mention a fella by the name of Sheringham?’

‘The man at the gym? That’s the only Sheringham we know.’

‘What is your husband’s relationship with him?’

‘Tim Sheringham? Drinking partners. There’s some age gap between them. Twenty years or so. More. They met at the gym. Tim’s the owner, I think. They occasionally went for a beer after Michael had been for his workout. Michael always booked in for the last session, nine till ten, so there was an hour’s troughing time left. That’s how stupid men are. All that good done to their little bodies and then they go to the pub and undo it all. But Michael and Tim Sheringham were not in business or anything.’

‘But they knew each other in a social manner?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Do you know when they last went out together?’

‘Last week, last Thursday evening. That’s Michael’s night at the gym.’

‘You were in York then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not in Ireland?’

‘No. Left for Ireland on the Friday. Returned yesterday.’

‘Your father will vouch for that?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Colleen Richardson flushed with anger.

‘What I said. He’ll vouch for that if we contact the Gardai in Galway, ask them to call on him, he’ll tell them that you were with him?’

‘He’ll tell them nothing. They’ll need to get where he is before he’ll speak to them.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he’s in the ground, God rest him. He died a year ago this weekend gone and I was not there, God forgive me. I went to his graveside and I told him how I was, how I was not.’