Free Trial by Fire by Frances Fyfield

surprise. 'Yes, ' he replied, 'leaving my stick.'
    Bailey gestured. Amanda Scott left the room, returned with the cane. 'This stick, Mr Sumner?'
    Instantly recognizable object even wrapped in polythene and decorated with a large label for passage to a dim laboratory with all other blood-marked objects.
    `Yes,' he said slowly, regarding the stick as he would a friend who had been transformed into enemy.
    `That's enough for now, I think,' said Bailey. Amanda Scott shuffled her sheets of paper in obvious disapproval.
    `Try to sleep, Mr Sumner. I'm afraid you must stay here.' Despite the pleas of your indignant lawyer who has already postponed all this, shouted advice, which you chose to ignore, interrupted to the extent that I barred him. No doubt we shall hear more of that. Never mind. No doubt, either, that dear Amanda was pleased to tell me the lawyer was called by Miss Summerfield at the behest of Miss West, your er, wife, sir. Well, well, they are friends, after all, but surely Helen knows me well enough to understand that I know by heart all that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act requires of me, including the fact that a man must be offered a lawyer as soon as he's offered a caution, and of course I did it.

    He grinned ruefully. Helen would also know there are some invitations that he, as well as custody officers, tended to make less audibly to a helpful witness than to a defendant. The rules were more malleable for a witness. Yawning and stretching, Bailey realized he needed his bed. It was three a.m., and for once he knew that he and Helen would not talk either this morning or tomorrow: there would be no time once he had turned back here for ten o'clock.
    Tomorrow, if they had raised that dentist and put a name to the corpse, he would be going for Antony Sumner's jugular, lawyers or no lawyers. He would ask Sumner, however politely, about his knife. About his shoes and his silly walking stick with the elephant head festooned with human hair.
    Somewhere in all of that, he and Helen would have to make time. Time was a thief in the night, one he knew well.
    By Sunday afternoon, Christine Summerfield was only weeping from time to time, and had noticed through the disfiguring filter of tears how dirty were the windows in her house. She wondered if the panes of glass in Antony's cottage were as grubby as usual, no doubt hiding the large uniforms who were taking apart the contents, finding God knows what apart from her own underwear and several dirty dishes. He had preferred lately to stay under her roof, enjoying all the obvious home comforts he had never secured for himself.
    Christine contemplated telephoning Helen West, felt in her bones a spurt of loathing, which she recognized as unfair to both occupants of that household, and did not phone.
    Instead, she cleaned her windows. When Helen phoned her, the response was predictably swift, not actually rude, but not polite, either.
    Helen waited for Bailey to wake, both of them reassured by early morning affection.
    'Trust me, darling,' words accompanied by a swift hug before he took his long body out of bed.
    Ì do,' she had replied, smiling at him. 'I do, most of the time.'
    The sun was shining. Bario's pink and grey restaurant disgorged the last of the lunchtime trade into shiny cars parked on the green where mothers talked over prams and fathers pretended to teach cricket to sons, while the less endowed waited in vain for buses.
    One mile away, the carpark to Bluebell Wood was still closed by a tape, the fragile officialdom of which defied destruction, with PC Bowles thrilling the questioners with a brief account of the reason why. The body in the wood was gossip but subdued gossip, slightly irrelevant to any of them yet. Mr Blundell had not volunteered to others what he had volunteered to the police, or the gossip would have been sharper.
    Bailey had ensured that this particular husband was not left unaccompanied while he waited to see if he was a widower: a large