For a moment, he didn’t even recognize her. That wasn’t good for a policeman. You needed a good memory for people you’d seen before. Bert usually prided himself on his memory for faces. He was off duty when he was at home; perhaps that’s why he’d switched off. He stirred his mind into reluctant action. He’d been working until nine in CID last night and then they’d had a couple of swift pints to unwind. He didn’t seem to be able to shrug pints off as easily as he once had, in his cricketing days. They’d had five or six pints sometimes, after Herefordshire had enjoyed a good day. It had never been a problem the next morning, not in those days. It shouldn’t be a problem now: he was forty-three, not seventy-three, for God’s sake. But as Chief Superintendent Lambert was wont to remind him, God seemed to have very little connection with the doings of policemen nowadays. He knew who this woman was now, but that only made him feel more guilty. A neighbour – next door but one, he was almost sure.
