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‘You know as well as I do it’s illegal to have a handgun. I’d have been down on him like a ton of bricks and so would my super. What do you think this is out here, the wild West?’
    ‘Just checking,’ Mower said, and there was no apology in his tone. ‘What made you think Christie had been in the army anyway?’
    ‘Just a feeling,’ Hewitt said. ‘He wasn’t local, though I think his wife was. He had a Scottish accent, I think, though he never said where he came from. It was the short hair cut, the way he walked maybe – a bit military, know what I mean? But he was very cagey, never gave owt away. Answered your questions – yes, no, maybe – polite but nothing more. No words wasted, any road. Quiet, amenable enough, but I wouldn’t have liked to get on the wrong side of him.’
    ‘And now we know he had a violent temper, so violent he probably hit his son – if the complaint to social services is to be believed – and seems to have ended up taking out his whole family with a handgun which suddenly appeared out of nowhere. So just what was that all about?’
    ‘You never know, do you?’ Hewitt said. ‘Some people just snap for no obvious reason at all.’
    ‘People may snap but they don’t usually have a powerful weapon to wreak this sort of carnage when they do.’
    ‘Right,’ Hewitt said unhappily. ‘I told you. I’d no idea about the pistol. No idea at all.’
    ‘And when they snap, there’s usually a trigger,’ Mower said, almost as if thinking aloud. ‘They may be stressed out but something makes them snap. In Christie’s case it doesn’t seem to have been money. There was plenty of cash going through his bank account, cash in the house, some of it unexplained. The house is well furnished, the kids seemed well looked after, apart from this incident with Scott. People commented on it. But what we don’t know is where he was getting those large sums of cash from. Did you get any clues about that? Did he have some sort of illegal scam going we ought to have known about? It can’t just be avoiding VAT and income tax. This is big money we’re talking about, for a self-employed odd job man. Who was paying him, and for what?’
    Hewitt shook his head. ‘As far as I knew he worked as a mechanic. She didn’t work at all. The kids looked okay to me. I didn’t have many problems up at Staveley. An occasional burglary and the teenagers mucking about in the bus shelter, that was about it. The Christies gave me no cause for concern. Apart from the visit by the social worker, egged on by some nosy neighbour, and to be honest I’d have been pretty upset if that had happened to me and my family.’
    ‘Well, it looks as though the nosy neighbour may have been on to something,’ Mower snapped. ‘But that wasn’t the trigger, was it? It happened a while back?’
    ‘A good few months ago,’ Hewitt said, returning to defensive mode. ‘I can check the date if you like. I did pass it on, you know. It wasn’t my decision to take no further action.’
    But more senior officers would have relied on Hewitt toassess the seriousness of Christie’s behaviour, Mower thought to himself, and Hewitt obviously hadn’t thought it was serious at all. He sighed.
    ‘Do you want me to check the date?’ PC Hewitt persisted.
    ‘Not now, later,’ Mower said irritably. ‘So, not shortage of money. What about sex? Tell me about Mrs Christie. Was she on the razzle? Was there any sign the marriage was in trouble?’
    ‘How the hell would I know that?’ Hewitt protested.
    ‘Gossip,’ Mower said surprisingly mildly. ‘Chatter in the pub, in the post office. Intelligence gathering, Gavin. Isn’t that what community policing is supposed to be about? Keeping an eye on things so we’re not taken by surprise, so we pick up the bad apples before they get out of hand. Did you know Mrs Christie? Did you ever talk to her? Or did you ever hear anyone talking about her?’
    Hewitt furrowed his brow in thought. ‘I saw