Martha expected a call to come in at any time about the house fire, either that the police had found a body or that they’d made contact with the missing woman. Had her job not been so absorbing the day might have passed slowly but it didn’t. She immersed herself in her tasks and left her office at five. On the way home she bought the Shropshire Star, expecting to see something more than she already knew but the newspaper headlines were muted, merely mentioning the fire in Sundorne without making much of it. There was no word of the nurse or whether she was dead or alive, the only reference being that the house which had been gutted by the fire belonged to a retired nurse named Monica Deverill, who was in her sixties. Martha assumed that the police would make no public comment until they had made certain of the woman’s fate. She scrutinized the headlines, trying to read the meaning behind the words and noted that no connection was made between the fire in Shrewsbury and the Melverley arson.
