Kissing the Gunner's Daughter by Ruth Rendell

at the table by seven forty-five sharp, same every night when she was home. It was always the same."
    "And it was the same tonight?"
    "It was always the same. I wheeled the trolley in at seven thirty. It was soup and sole and apricots with yoghurt. I put my head round the sare door, they were all there ..."
    "Round the what?"
    "The sare. That's the name they had for it. The conservatory. I said I was off and I went out the back way like I always do."
    "Did you lock the back door?"
    "No, of course I didn't. I never do that. Besides, Bib was still there."
    "She helps out. Comes up on her bike. She's got a morning job some mornings so she mostly comes here in the afternoons. I left her here, finishing off the freezer, and she said she'd be off in five minutes." A thought suddenly struck her. Her colour changed -- for the first time. "The cat," she said, "is the cat all right? Oh, they didn't kill the cat!"
    "Not so far as I know," Wexford said. "Well, no, certainly not."
    Before he could add, as he had begun to, suppressing a tone of irony, "Only the people", she exclaimed, "Thank God for that!" Wexford gave her a moment. "Around eight, did you hear anything? A car? Shots?" i He knew the shots would not have been heard
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    from here. Not shots fired inside the house. She shook her head.
    "A car wouldn't go past here. The road ends here. There's only the main road in and the byroad."
    "The byroad?"
    She answered him impatiently. She was one of those people who expect everyone to know, as well as they themselves do, the workings and rules and geography of their little private world. "It's the one comes up from Pomfret Monachorum, isn't it?"
    Gabbitas said, "That's the way I came home."
    "What time was that?"
    "Twenty past eight, half past. I didn't see anyone, if that's what you're asking. I didn't meet a car or pass one or anything like that."
    Wexford thought that came out rather too pat. Then Ken Harrison spoke. The words came slowly, as if he had suffered an injury to his throat and was still learning how to project his voice. "We didn't hear a thing. There wasn't a sound." He added, wonderingly -- and incomprehensibly -- "There never was." He explained. "You can never hear anything at the house from here."
    The others seemed long to have registered and accepted what had happened. Mrs Harrison had adjusted to it almost at once. Her world had altered but she would contend with it. Her husband reacted as if the news had just that moment been broken to him, "All dead? Did you say they were all dead?"
    It sounded to Wexford like something out of
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    Macbeth, though he wasn't sure it was. A lot of tonight was like something out of Macbeth.
    "The young girl. Miss Flory, Daisy, she's alive."
    But, he thought, is she? Is she still alive? Then Harrison shocked him. He thought that was impossible but Harrison did it.
    "Funny they didn't finish her off, wasn't it?"
    Barry Vine coughed.
    "Have another cup of tea, will you" said Brenda Harrison. "No, thank you. It's getting late and we'll be off. You'll want to get to bed."
    "You've finished with us, then, have you?"
    Perhaps it was a favourite word with him. Ken Harrison was looking with a kind of glazed wistfulness at Wexford.
    "Finished? No, by no means. We shall want to talk to you all again. Perhaps you'll let me have Bib's address. What's her other name?"
    No one seemed to know. They had the address but no surname. She was just Bib.
    "Thanks for the tea," said Vine.
    Wexford went back to the house by car. Sumner-Quist had gone. Archbold and Milsom were working away upstairs. Burden said to him, "I forgot to mention it but I had road blocks put on all the roads out of here when the message came through."
    "What, before you knew what it was about?"
    "Well, I knew it was in the nature of a -- a hnassacre. She said, 'They're all dead' when she made her 999 call. You think I over-reacted, do you?
    i"
    KGD5
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    "No," said Wexford slowly, "no, not at all. I think you were right, insofar