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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

‘WELL, am I under arrest?’

Honor stared across the battered wooden table at the irritatingly fresh-faced female police constable. Old age must really be creeping up on her if policemen and women had started to look like schoolchildren. Suddenly she felt every one of her creaking twenty-five years!

‘Not yet. Right now you’re simply helping us with our enquiries,’ the constable said, with a complacency Honor found equally irritating.

‘So this is entirely voluntary, right? If I want to I can walk out of here without answering any of your questions,’ she said, to emphasise that she wasn’t prepared to be pushed around any longer.

Her wits were starting to return at last and she bitterly regretted having allowed herself to be bundled into the police car in the first place. But she had been so confused, so utterly mortified that she hadn’t cared how she retreated from the scene of her embarrassment, as long as it was at high speed! The police had been extremely efficient in that respect at least, but now they were being stupidly stubborn about letting her go.

‘You could do that,’ said the older, non-uniformed man leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the tiny interview-room. ‘But that would mean that we would have to make a decision as to whether to let you go or charge you. And I can tell you that on the evidence so far I would have to come down on the side of an immediate arrest. In that case you’d be held in custody until tomorrow’s court sitting.

Honor blanched. With the currently uneven state of her finances the idea of involving lawyers was far more of a disincentive than summary incarceration. At least one didn’t have to pay to be in prison!

She had forgotten the plain-clothes man’s name but he had introduced himself as a detective inspector from Auckland Central and she supposed that she should be grateful that he had hauled her off to a nearby police station rather than taken her straight back to the city. If only Harry, the local constable, had been involved she might have been able to laugh it all off, but this was evidently a city-based operation that had spilled out into the rural fringes of Auckland, and explaining herself to strangers was a great deal more difficult.

She sighed, and glumly eyed the senior officer. At least he looked on the wrong side of thirty, with enough experience of human life to have a bit of sympathy for people caught up in awkward situations of none of their own making... well, almost none.