For a moment, the artist and the coroner looked at one another in complete understanding. Then Katherine Morton shook her head and looked away. ‘I try not to think about it,’ she said.

‘This happened nearly two years ago, didn’t it?’ Trudy continued, carefully feeling her way now.

‘Yes, it happened one night. One night that should have been just like any other night. Only it wasn’t. And it still feels as if it happened only yesterday,’ Katherine added, nodding.

‘What happened?’ Trudy asked, although, again, she already had the details. The eighteen-year-old girl, who’d only passed her driving test the previous month, had lost control of her MG sports car and crashed into a lorry on a busy main road not far from the market town of Banbury. She had been killed instantly. The shaken lorry driver had suffered only very minor injuries. But what, Trudy wondered with a pang, did such a thing do to someone? She doubted that he was still driving lorries today, even though her colleagues in Banbury had quickly established from the many witnesses that he had in no way been to blame.

‘Her father gave her the money to buy herself a car – and of course she chose a silly little low-slung sporty thing in bright red,’ Katherine said, her voice taking on a hard, nasty edge now. ‘I told him she was too young and wild for it, but he always indulged her. And she, the little minx, knew how to twist him right round her little finger.’

She drained her glass and topped it up from the bottle, her hand shaking visibly.

‘So what happened?’ Trudy led her as gently as she could.

‘Oh, she’d been to a party and had been drinking too much.’ At this irony, the artist regarded her newly full glass and gave a sudden harsh, despairing bark of laugher. ‘Mea culpa, obviously. Her father, the swine, wasn’t easy to live with and … Well, from an early age she’d seen us both drink liberally. So you see …’ She tossed a defiant, heartbreaking and wretched smile at them. ‘It was all my own fault that I lost my little girl.’

She took another gulp and leaned her head tiredly back against the headrest of her chair.

‘But it wasn’t entirely your fault, was it?’ Trudy remarked calmly.

Katherine rolled her eyes Trudy’s way, and a small, odd, almost whimsical smile played across her lips. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘No. There was your husband who gave Amy Jean the money to buy it in the first place and, of course, the man who sold her the car.’

The words hung in the air invitingly. All four inhabitants of the room listened to them echo, each chasing their own thoughts.