"Yes, and Roger. Tommy scooped us all up off the beach in his car and took us back to the house. He told me first, upstairs in the bedroom. Said it was to do with the business. And a possible scandal. He'd let Hugo tell me. Then he told the parents in the living room, so I wasn't there to witness it. But I saw Roger afterwards, as I was leaving to come here, in the kitchen. He looked gray and old and shattered. He was sitting limply at the table, staring into space. Belinda was in her room. I didn't pause to ask Tommy how she'd taken it, I don't care, frankly. She's always been foul to me. Oh, sweet as pie on the outside but wears you down eventually with her sly, horrible remarks. Well, I don't have to tell you. I never want to set foot in that house again," she said vehemently. She glanced down at her hands. Blinked miserably. "Of course, I will. For Roger. For the children. You do, don't you?" She looked at me beseechingly.

"Yes," I agreed. "You do all sorts of things for love. You have to." I swallowed. "Have you told the children?"

"No. And I may not. Probably won't. Iris has taken them to put the horses back in the fields, then they'll be shattered and go straight to bed. Iris . . .”

"What?"

“She looked so strange. Like she knew more. I've always wondered if Iris knew about me and Hugo."

I nodded. "Although . . . this — what Hugo's done — has nothing to do with that. This is about the company, the water."

"Yes, but it's all connected, don't you think?" She shifted round in her seat to look at me properly. "It's about Belinda's influence on him. She's constantly on the phone to him, in London. I hear him talking to her in the study, he always takes the call in another room, always. And she came up to see him recently, at the house, and I listened." She glanced fearfully at me. "At the door."

"Good for you," I encouraged her. "And?"

“Didn't make sense to me. But she kept saying it was all above board, and that she'd had something checked by a lawyer, and by an independent team of accountants. That it was all fine. That all Hugo had to do was write some reports to fill in the gaps. I have no idea what she meant."

I nodded, my eyes widening in horror at the scale of her involvement: at the magnitude of her influence and the overplaying of her hand. I didn't want to heap any more grief on Christina right now, didn't want to tell her what Tommy and I knew. Hugo would tell her, of that I was sure; Tommy had laid the groundwork. It felt disloyal to tell tales. Clearly Tommy had felt the same. Fortuitously, at that moment, a nurse popped her head out of Hugo's room.

“Mrs Bellingdon?"