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breaking and entering specialists.’
    â€˜Sorry, I don’t follow you.’ He looked puzzled.
    â€˜Well, you know that last week, Saturday to be exact, he was robbed of a valuable book.’
    Pepper’s face went blank like a TV channel after sign-off. I shut up, because I’m sure he wouldn’t have taken in what I said. Gradually, I could see blood flowing above his collar-line as his face returned to its customary pink. He blinked and gave a nervous grin. ‘Let’s have that again, please.’
    I explained what I had thought he would have known already. I was wrong, it would seem, because he questioned me closely. As far as he knew, there had been no report of a theft from this Albany Avenue address. Moore had been robbed of a next-to-priceless book, but he hadn’t reported it to the police!

 
    Â 
    Chapter Four
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    Honour Griffin didn’t look more than thirty from where I was sitting. She was tall and, from a strictly male point of view, very pleasantly put together. With long flaxen hair, green eyes and a face that could have added a few ships to the fleet that Helen launched against Troy, she was, in a word, a knock-out. She was wearing a loosely knitted grey sweater that was too large for her. Her long legs were wrapped in faded jeans. She had a way of pulling at a lock of hair near her ear that I found easy to concentrate on. Sergeant Pepper introduced us as soon as he returned to the room with her. Her walking into the house had interrupted Pepper’s questioning for less than three minutes. Obviously, with her entrance, I was returned to the live box with the rest of the small fry.
    â€˜Mr. Cooperman was doing some work for your husband,’ he explained simply. She nodded with a certain indifference. Obviously, this was not as big a moment for her as it was for me. But then, I hadn’t just become Tony Moore’s widow. I wondered whether an estranged wife can become a first-class widow with no points taken off. I expressed my regrets at her loss and told her that I would be glad to do anything I could to clear up the matter of Moore’s death. She frowned, not unpleasantly, in my direction.
    â€˜Do you know about the theft that took place here last week?’ Pepper asked her. She shook her head.
    â€˜I didn’t see Tony last week,’ she said. ‘I talked to him briefly on the phone, but that’s all.’
    â€˜Then you know nothing, or very little, about who Mr. Moore was seeing during the last few days.’
    â€˜That’s right. We were going through a bad spell. To make it bearable, we kept our distance from one another.’
    â€˜Did he have any enemies that you know about?’
    â€˜He had business rivals, if that’s what you mean. Most of them would not, I think, include murder in a normal business day.’
    I wanted her to name these rivals, but I thought that by keeping my mouth shut I might get to hear more. I couldn’t understand why Pepper was letting me hear this much. It didn’t sound like routine practice to me. But what do I know? Maybe the antics of my friends Savas and Staziak at Niagara Regional Police are not typical of policemen in general, just the aberrations of working in a community as small as Grantham, where a secret lasts only half an hour on a rainy day.
    But so far, Pepper was asking good questions. I simply made a mentallist of the ones I would have added and tried to disappear into the chintz fabric of the couch.
    â€˜May I ask where you are living, Mrs. Moore? Or is it Griffin?’
    â€˜I get both and answer to both. Neither is my maiden name. I have a condominium on Walmer Road.’ She gave him the number and he wrote it down along with the telephone number, which she also sup plied. I tried to put both of them into my memory bank, since I didn’t want to risk bringing out a pencil.
    â€˜Then I take it that your estrangement from Mr. Moore was not