"Evening, ma'am. Wickham Falls police. Can you turn around for me?"
She turned around. She did it slowly, the box still in her arm, her free hand open and away from her body where he could see it. She could not see him. She could see only the light, and the dark shape of the car behind it, and a darker shape standing beside the open door, and the little red dot of something on the shape's chest.
"Thank you," the shape said. "Can you tell me where you're headed tonight?"
"Home," she said.
"And where's home?"
"Quarry Lane," she said. "Number nine. At the top of this road, on the left."
The shape did not answer. It did not move. The silence went on long enough that she heard the spotlight humming, and the engine of the car, and the leaves coming down around her in the beam, ticking against the stone wall as they fell.
"Try again," he said.
She did not understand him. She thought for a moment the cold had done something to her hearing. "Excuse me?"
"I said try again." He came forward then, out of the glare, and she could see him: a white man in a dark blue uniform jacket with a fur collar, not tall, thick through the chest, a flashlight in his left hand pointed at the ground near her feet and his right hand resting on his belt by his hip, not on anything, only near it. His face was square and gray in the half-light, with deep lines on either side of the mouth and a short haircut that had gone the color of iron. He looked tired. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been awake for a long time for reasons that had nothing to do with work. "I know who lives at nine Quarry Lane. An old man lives at nine Quarry Lane. By himself."