‘So,’ she went on, ‘I find it rather sad that Niall ended up married to a woman like that. He was always a bastard, but he used to have some integrity. About his work, anyway. Not about much else. He may not have believed in marriage till he reached middle age, but he certainly believed in infidelity. Which, strangely, is the one subject Grace Bellamy hasn’t written a column about. Yet. Maintaining the front of the everything-in-the-garden’s-lovely marriage, I dare say. Doesn’t want to threaten their domestic bliss.’ More pure venom.

‘Some wives, I’m told, can close their minds to their husbands’ infidelities. Which must be a very necessary ability for anyone married to a predatory pouncer like Niall. He was always the same. God, I’ve spent enough times in war zones with him to witness him in action. He’d make a grab at anything with breasts and a pulse.

‘Which, all right, may not say much for my taste that I went to bed with him. But he did have an undeniable something, particularly back then. And when you’re stuck out somewhere like Beirut in the 1980s, never knowing whether you’d see the end of the next day … well, a sort of blitz mentality develops. The Commodore Hotel witnessed many unlikelier couplings than me and Niall.

‘Still, I dare say age has slowed him down a bit by now. Difficult to recapture the spontaneity of a predatory pouncer when you have to wait an hour for the Viagra to kick in.’

I was quite surprised by the vitriol Ingrid Richards directed towards her former lover and his wife. From her detached, even sceptical manner, I’d expected her to present a more woman-of-the-world response to romantic disappointments. But Niall Connor had clearly got under skin, as well as under her duvet, and had hurt her deeply.

I felt the time had arrived when I could say something. ‘When Alexandra talked to me, she gave the impression that her father hadn’t played much of a part in her life.’

‘No. The only part he played was impregnating me. And he didn’t know he’d achieved that until a long time after the event. He’d lost interest in me long before he knew Alexandra existed. I don’t think he ever had much interest in her.’

‘And was she resentful of that?’

Ingrid shrugged. ‘I would assume so, but I don’t really know. I never found it easy to find out what Alexandra was thinking.’

‘What about now?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Do you find it any easier to know what she’s thinking now she’s an adult?’

‘God, no. Harder than ever.’ She turned the lion’s eyes on me with disarming frankness. ‘Look, I really don’t know much about Alexandra. I’ve never spent any length of time with her. It’s only recently that she’s insisted on being in touch on a regular basis. Looking after me – that’s probably the way she sees it. God save me from that! And I suppose her bringing you in to check me out is part of her mistaken mission of mercy.