Frost drained his mug and dropped his cigarette end in it. ‘This is getting nastier and nastier. It started off with heavy-breathing phone calls, now it’s death threats. Right, Jordan. Nip down to the village and ask around. Did anyone see anything… any strange cars lurking about someone stinking of petrol.’ As the constable left, he stood up. ‘Buttock-viewing time,’ he told Gilmore. ‘We’re going to chat up Mrs Compton.’

Gilmore followed him out of the kitchen, along the waxed wooden-floored passage and into the lounge, a large, high-ceilinged room which had a rich, rustic, new- sacking smell from the dark chocolate-coloured hessian covering its walls.

Jill Compton, standing to receive them, looked much younger than her twenty-three years. She wore a gauzy cobweb of a baby doll nightdress which hid nothing, and over it a silken house-coat which flapped open so as not to spoil the view through the nightdress. Her hair, fringed over wide blue eyes and free-flowing down her back, was a light, golden corn colour. She wore no make-up and the pale, china doll face with a hint of dark rings around the eyes gave her a look of vulnerability. She smiled bravely. ‘I’m sorry I’m not dressed.’

‘That’s quite all right, Mrs Compton,’ said Frost, and there was no doubting the sincerity in his voice. ‘It’s a sod about your summer house.’

‘It could have been the house,’ she said, her voice unsteady. ‘Did you see that letter?’

Before Frost could answer the front door slammed and a man’s voice called, ‘Jill – I’m home! Where are you?’

‘Mark!’ She ran out to meet her husband.

‘Damn!’ grunted Frost. ‘The buttock-squeezer’s back!’ Mark Compton was twenty-nine and flashily good- looking. Fair-haired, a bronzed complexion, although slightly overweight from good living, he looked like a retired life-guard out of Neighbours. Gilmore hated him instantly for his looks, his money, his perfectly fitting silver-grey suit, his arm around Mrs Compton, but most of all for his hand caressing her bare arm.