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Eventually, I just didn’t dare to bring it up anymore.”
    “How was she behaving badly?”
    Mrs Duncan wiped her face. “I thought I’d already said. She was rude, moody. Such hard work to be around. She didn’t want to do anything with me, with Tom, with anyone.”
    “So she didn’t go out much?”
    An incredulous look. “She went out all the time . She was never at home. But she would never say who she was going out with.”
    “Did she ever bring any friends home?”
    “Amy came over sometimes.” Mrs Duncan sniffed. “She’s known her for years. She’s a nice girl.”
    “Amy is Elodie’s best friend? What’s her surname?”
    “Peters.” Mrs Duncan hesitated, pulling again at the arm of the chair. “She hasn’t been round for a while. I think Elodie and she had an argument.”
    “An argument? What about, Mrs Peters?”
    Mrs Duncan shook her head.
    “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
    There was a moment’s silence. Kate thought back through the conversation, making a mental list of the words used by Elodie’s mother.  Moody, difficult, secretive...  She recalled the manic glitter she’d seen in Elodie’s eyes, and her heart sank a little. As if reading her thoughts, Mr Duncan asked in an almost inaudible voice, “How did she die?”
    Mrs Duncan winced as if he had shouted. Anderton shook his head slowly.
    “We don’t yet know, I’m afraid. The post-mortem will tell us more.”
    Mr Duncan opened his mouth as if to ask another question and then shut it again. There was a lengthy moment of silence in the room. Kate caught sight of a photograph of a younger Elodie on the mantelpiece, framed in silver. She had an impish grin on her face and was staring out of the frame, pointed chin lifted. She looked as though she were laughing at them all.
     

Chapter Four
     
    Kate had attended many post-mortems in the course of her career, but they had yet to become commonplace. She steadied herself with a deep breath. She always felt something like awe at the magnitude of death—how a whole, remarkable person could be reduced down to a waxen reproduction of themselves. The pathologist performing the autopsy was someone Kate hadn’t met before, a young man called Stanton. She had hoped it would be Doctor Telling, who she rather liked for being quiet and gentle and skilled at her job, but she was apparently on holiday for three weeks. Kate’s mind conjured up a rather bizarre mental picture of the gaunt, pale doctor sunning herself on a beach somewhere, still dressed in her pathologist’s scrubs. She dismissed the thought, as it was provoking an inappropriate grin, and brought herself back to the task in hand.
    Anderton had cried off, citing a meeting, but Olbeck had met her at the coroner’s offices, turning up looking rather better than he had done yesterday. Presumably he’d not been out partying to the early hours the night before. Kate could understand his decision to stay in; she could think of few things worse than having to observe an autopsy with a raging hangover. She said as much to Olbeck.
    “What would you know about it?” he said, rather grumpily. “You never   get  hangovers. You hardly bloody drink.”
    “I can still imagine it.”
    “Well, anyway. Let’s get on with it.”
    Dr Stanton had a rather brusque manner, tersely commenting as he performed the various tasks that would untangle the mystery of Elodie’s death.
    “Are there any indications of suicide?” asked Olbeck, who’d disappeared halfway through the operation to answer a text message, rather to Kate’s annoyance.
    “Most definitely not,” said Stanton. He turned away from the table, leaning back against the instrument bench against the wall. “There’s no water in the lungs, which is always a good indication.”
    “Ah.”
    “And more pertinently than that, the hyoid bone is fractured.”
    Kate knew the significance of that. “So she was strangled?”
    Doctor Stanton looked at her appraisingly and