Those terrible benches, the green velvet drapes, the panelled room like a high-walled coffin. When she got up to speak, she tripped and jarred her thigh on the corner of a table. She wore gloves, knowing how her hands would be seen, and Crowther had said, might I suggest that you leave that fabulous bauble at home, madam? We don’t want to give the wrong impression, so she’d put the ring in a drawer, locked it and pocketed the key in her purse.

Joan and Pat stared at her as if she were a painting. Their man Smithson approached her. “Miss Enid Campbell, you claim to have wanted, and in fact asked for, all of your children – a claim, my Lord, that Miss Campbell disputes – yet,” he turned back to Enid, “you took only Ian. Why was that?”

“I panicked.” No, that was not the right answer. She tried again. “I knew she wouldn’t agree. I thought if I got Ian, Finetta would follow and she did. I knew Ian was the one Joan wanted.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because she’d made him her heir.”

“I was under the impression your mother had made him heir.”

“She did; to her, not to Joan.”

“Were you party to the conversations that took place between Lady George and Miss Campbell in the succession of her estate?”

“Of course I wasn’t.”

“Then how do you know what was said?”

“I don’t. I’m just saying that Ian was mother’s heir, and then he became Joan’s after Joan inherited my mother’s estate.”

“In actuality, madam, your mother, Lady George, insisted her grandson remain heir despite the act of her stepping down. Who else, after all, was there? Your son is, was and always will be heir, regardless of to whom. Might I add, my Lord, that Miss Campbell wholeheartedly agreed to this. Her inheritance was an act of caretaking, as she has pointed out, and changed nothing of the facts of Ian’s position. In which case,” he returned to Enid, “his position as heir to Miss Campbell was no indication of partiality of feelings – it was simply a fact. That you choose this to bring to our attention points more at your own inclination to single him out than it does hers. You kidnapped him—”

“I didn’t, I—”

“—directly following the disclosure from your former husband that your sister had become an extremely wealthy woman. You were, in fact, previous to this, about to agree to give full custody of all your children to Mr Anstruther.”

“I hadn’t agreed to anything. I met him to discuss things and found he’d already given them away.”

“And your sister was an heiress.”

“That had nothing to do with it.”

“Really, madam? Do you expect us to believe that the new position of your sister, with whom you have never been friendly, had no effect on you at all?”