The Darkest Evening

usually such a cold fish. ‘They seem like a happy couple who’ve made the decision that they want a simpler life. So, a few months ago, she gave up her career in the law and he stopped being an accountant and they came to live in the country with their son. Juliet was an old schoolfriend and she gave Dorothy the cottage. A tied cottage that goes with the job of housekeeper. The couple are hoping to buy it eventually if the family will agree. They definitely see their long-term future there. Karan is going to start a post-graduate teaching course in September. He’s become friendly with Connie Browne.’
‘That’s the woman who owned the car.’ The names were all up on the whiteboard, but Vera wanted to make sure the whole team understood. ‘Perhaps that’s just a coincidence though. A community like that, everyone knows each other. It’s not on the tourist route, too far from Hadrian’s Wall, the coast or the Pennine Way to attract visitors.’ And that’s just as I like it.
‘It did seem odd then,’ Holly went on, ‘that neither Dorothy nor Karan admitted to knowing Lorna. You’d have thought they’d at least have heard of her.’
‘You think they’re hiding something?’
Holly shrugged. ‘Maybe. Or perhaps I was just getting a bit hypersensitive.’
‘Eh, pet,’ Vera smiled, ‘that’s just what we need at the start of a case like this.’ A pause. ‘Did either of them see or hear anything on Friday?’
‘They claim not. Karan Pabla was in all day after a quick trip to the shops in the morning.’
And the man on his own in the cottage with the bairn surely would have heard a young woman, banging on the door screaming in panic. Vera still couldn’t understand how the woman wouldn’t have stopped at the first house she came to. Did that mean she wasn’t being chased? That she was heading to the big house because she knew the family and was attacked in the grounds just as she was getting there? It was possible that Vera was making too much of the open car door. It was too soon to get hung up on the details.
‘Actions for today. Joe, after you’ve spoken to the Blackstocks, I’d like you to check out the clinic where Lorna was treated for the eating disorder. They might have a record of the people who visited her and I want to understand more about it. I always thought it was tricky for sufferers of anorexia to get pregnant, but I don’t want to rely on guesswork and myth. Holly and Charlie, let’s have you back in Kirkhill, canvassing the neighbours. Sunday lunchtime, there’ll be a few old boys in the pub having a pint before their Sunday lunch. That’ll be for you, Charlie. Get them chatting. We want all the gossip about the Falstones.’
Vera looked around her. ‘The rest of you, the important things. Facts. Chase up the technicians who are working on the car. There won’t be CCTV on the roads around Brockburn but there might be in Kirkhill, and there are speed cameras on the road out of the village. There’s a chance they might have picked up the car Lorna was driving. And I want to know where Lorna was on the day before she died. She went somewhere on her own on the Thursday morning because she asked Connie to babysit. It was a last-minute thing so it might have been urgent. A GP’s appointment? A meeting with the baby’s dad that might have triggered the events of the following day?’
‘What about you?’ Holly. Cheeky mare. She added too late, ‘Boss. Where will you be?’
‘Me?’ Vera gave her one of her special smiles. ‘I’ll be back at my ancestral home.’

Chapter Fourteen
VERA WANTED TO RETRACE HER JOURNEY of Friday night in the light. The weather was grey and gloomy and there were sharp bursts of hail that rattled on the windscreen of the Land Rover like the spatter of shotgun pellets, but at least she could see where she was going. She parked close to where Connie’s car had been. The lay-by where it had ended up was no more than an entrance to a field gate, muddy and pocked with puddles. Shards of ice still floated on the water and blades of discoloured grass poked through the patches of snow.
She’d realized quite clearly driving here where she’d taken the wrong road in the blizzard. There were two right turns very close to each other and she’d missed the first, the road not taken, which would have led her home. On the opposite side of the road to the gate, the forest came almost to the side of the road, the trees thick and tall, but here, where the car had been, there was open farmland, surrounded by a drystone wall. Vera thought now that car might have ended up there by design rather than accident. She had assumed it had skidded off the road, but it was impossible to tell if that was the case.
She climbed out of the Land Rover and stood for a moment, looking across the field to the valley. There was a view to the big house. Brockburn was looking very grand at this distance with its pillars, its symmetry and its extensive parkland. It was too far away to see the crumbling stone and peeling paint. In a blizzard, Vera suspected, even the lights would be hardly visible; she’d seen something there, but had thought it marked the edge of Kirkhill village. Lorna must have known where she was going. It would surely be too much of a coincidence for both of them to have taken the wrong road and ended up in the same place. Vera left her Land Rover where it was and started to walk.
On the Friday evening she’d driven up the hill until she came to the crossroads with the signpost to Kirkhill. That road had taken her in a wide semicircle to the main entrance