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wouldn’t have been inside the cupboard at all, she’d have been on the floor in the corridor, wouldn’t she?’
    Joyce said nothing.
    ‘Which suggests to me, Miss Cruikshank, that you must have opened the cupboard yourself. Is that what happened?’
    Joyce was shaking her head vehemently. ‘No, I didn’t open any cupboard. I don’t think I did … it’s not what I …’ She turned to Sara. ‘Can we go home now, dear? Pretzel wants to go home.’
    ‘Look, she’s had a bad shock,’ Sara said. ‘You can’t go on with this.’
    ‘What would I be opening a cupboard for? It’s not my cupboard.’
    ‘Will you please tell me why you opened the cupboard, Miss Cruikshank?’
    ‘I … wasn’t just … I don’t do that kind of thing … I wouldn’t …’
    ‘Look, what’s the point of this?’ Sara demanded. ‘How dare you put her through this? Can’t you understand what it must be like to have a corpse fall on top of you out of a cupboard?’
    Joyce had covered her face with her hands. She gave a quiet wail, which Pretzel answered with a protective bark. He scrambled to his feet and took up a wriggling guard in front of her knees, dancing up and down on his splayed front feet and growling softly. Bridger sighed. This would have to be followed up later at the station, with any luck when Poole’s ‘close personal friend’, aka his bit of fanny, and the fucking dog weren’t around.
    ‘Yes, thank you, Miss Selkirk, I think I can,’ he said. ‘If Miss Cruikshank doesn’t wish to continue, we can speak to her another time. But we shall need to interview her again.’ He had deliberately omitted to say, ‘as a witness’, but this seemed to satisfy Selkirk, who was leaning back with her arms folded. God, she was so bloody superior, all big eyes and no tits. ‘And I understand that Miss Cruikshank is staying with you, isn’t she? Well, we’ll call and arrange for her to talk to someone at the station, assuming you have no objection. Now, if I may detain you for another few minutes, perhaps we can go on to whatyou saw when you came down the corridor. Assuming your dog doesn’t mind?’
    Pretzel slithered back down to the floor and rested his chin on Joyce’s foot. Ten minutes later, Bridger dismissed Joyce and Sara generously, after hearing Sara’s account of finding the dead woman and Joyce in the corridor. He even managed a smile as he watched them make their way, with the bandy-legged dog, back out into the sunshine. Selkirk wouldn’t be looking so superior much longer. He would crack the old soak’s pathetic story about the corpse falling on top of her out of the cupboard, because Bridger’s instincts were telling him something quite different. Cruikshank was a down-and-out with a drink habit, and the Jean Brodie accent and the presence of Selkirk didn’t alter that. She’d opened that door, all right. But she had been opening it to stuff the corpse in. Because, coming across an easy touch in the toilet, a Jap woman even smaller and weaker than she was, she’d gone after that expensive camera, maybe the wallet, too. That black stinking handbag was big enough to stash them. In all likelihood the Jap had left her stuff on the side of the basin when she was washing her hands or looking in the mirror, people never learned. Anyway, she had presumably seen Cruikshank trying to lift the stuff and put up a struggle, more of a struggle than Cruikshank had bargained for. Perhaps she hadn’t meant to kill her, but after she had, she’d tried to hide her in the cupboard. If she’d managed it, the body wouldn’t have been discovered for hours. It was risky, but less risky than leaving her in the toilet. They’d just ordered lunch, hadn’t they, so she was going to be stuck there for a while and unless she hid it the body would be discovered within minutes, while she wasstill there. And she had already been in the toilet too long to rush out pretending she’d just found her dead. If she’d