There was nothing too unusual about that. But by now she would normally have heard from him; even his tardy sense of domestic responsibility normally prodded him to ring home before this time, especially now that his car had the phone that he had resisted as long as he could. Police wives are disciplined early to a routine of disappointed children and ruined meals. When John was in his twenties and still making his way in the force, it had been a severe blow to the status of a CID officer if his wife had the temerity to ring in to inquire about his whereabouts. They had almost split up in those days over his allegiance to his work before his home. That seemed so long ago that the wife who had objected to his brusque dismissal of her feelings and her aspirations might have been a different woman. She realised as she watched the difficulties of other young wives that her situation had not been the uniquely bleak one it had seemed at the time, when her own career seemed discarded for ever and her conversation restricted to the vocabulary of her pre-school children.
