The Company She Kept by Marjorie Eccles

though the branches were still bare, the sour green buds of the daffodils were just about to burst and crocus had spread themselves in sheets under the trees. Ducks were quacking, children rolled balls across the grass, the sun was trying to break through from behind the clouds and Mayo, who was not famously noted for his charm, was going out of his way to be nice to her. Abigail felt herself begin to relax for the first time that morning. For the first time since last night’s argument, if the truth be told ...
    She tried to dismiss thoughts of last night but the letter from the house agent, crackling in her pocket, wouldn’t let her. He was pestering her for a decision on a small house just outside Brome, and wrote now that there were other people interested. A self-interested lie, she was certain, but she was going to have to make up her mind, anyway, for several other reasons. At the moment, she was living with her parents, though it wasn’t a state of affairs considered permanent or desirable by any of them. Indeed, her mother’s quickly-concealed dismay at the thought of such had been comic, when her daughter had come home after university and her initial police training. Abigail had been born relatively late in their lives and the two of them, her mother and father, had grown used to being a pair again, to the gentle routine of their lives in retirement – her mother’s bridge and meals-on-wheels, her father’s Spanish classes. That was one reason. And to Abigail, having her own space was one of the most important things in life, which was another reason – and the cause of the argument last night.
    She desperately wanted the house, but she was determined it was going to be hers alone.
    She’d fallen for it immediately, but its semi-derelict condition and her own lack of time, plus a reluctance to saddle herself with a mortgage, was making her hold back. What attracted her as much as anything was its garden. You could do a lot with a garden. You could have fun taking out your frustrations on a stint of deep digging, or heaving stones around to make a rockery. You could lie back and drink lemonade on the patio. Grow roses. And your own veg, fresh as the morning dew. Also, let it not be forgotten, mow the lawn, trim the hedges, chase bugs with a spray, weed the vegetable patch ... it needed thinking about, if you were a CID officer and your free time didn’t come on a regular, or even dependable, basis. And if you had ambition. She sighed and forced her thoughts back to her job, to what, in the end, mattered most to her.
    â€˜Not what we expected from the PM, was it, sir?’ she ventured as an opening gambit after a moment or two.
    â€˜That’s what PMs are allegedly for – so we shan’t be tempted to take anything for granted – in theory, at least.’
    The pathologist had made his expected pronouncements: that death was due to manual strangulation; that the scratches on the dead woman’s neck were defensive wounds, the minute fragments of skin underneath the nails were her own, made by herself when she had clawed at her assailant in an attempt to save herself, thereby breaking off two of her long red fingernails. Horrible, thought Abigail, hideous thoughts of that moment of death coming unbidden. As Timpson-Ludgate had previously stated, postmortem lividity of the body showed that it had been placed in a seated position for some time after death, probably, as he had suggested, in the seat of a car.
    And then, the unexpected ...
    Despite her disordered clothing when she was found, it was quite clear that Angie Robinson had been neither raped nor sexually assaulted. Not only that, she had never at any time had sexual intercourse. She had, indisputably, been a virgin.
    â€˜One of Lavenstock’s silent minority.’
    That had been one of Timpson-Ludgate’s tasteless jokes. Mayo didn’t respond and Abigail, recalling with a shiver that icy