‘The pansies were in a blue glazed bowl on the kitchen table, purple and yellow, blue and copper velvety kitten’s faces freaked with black, and also in a bed by the back door where they straggled on leggy stems around the drain and leaking water butt. There was not a trace of blood. Joe’s father’s words had conjured up a wreckage of flowers streaked and spattered with red; the scene of a gory murder. An innocent bee investigated the absence of a crime.’ (p.219)
