Of course! How stupid I’d been not to recognize the name. Now I knew exactly who Ingrid Richards was. I should have recognized her from the distinctive scar. She had been a fixture on our television screens for decades. Not so much in the last ten years, but up until then, wherever the wars were fiercest, that’s where Ingrid Richards was to be found. Jokes used to float around, as some new international crisis emerged. ‘Oh, it must be serious. They’ve sent Ingrid Richards out there.’

And I remembered the outline details of how she got the scar. It was a war wound, a badge of honour, sustained in some hellhole. Beirut, I think it was. Ingrid Richards had been out there sometime in the 1980s, which of course would have been when she got together with Niall Connor. They were both in Lebanon covering a civil war, was it …? I’m sorry, I’m not very good on the history of the Middle East. But I seem to recall that Ingrid was with a cameraman, covering the conflict for the BBC, and they were too near to a car bomb which was detonated …? Something like that. Both of them were hit by shrapnel – that’s when she got the head injury. Then I think Ingrid Richards was brought back to the UK and hospitalized for quite a while …

What I do know for certain is that the dent in her forehead became part of her image, a constant reminder to the nation’s viewers of the dangers she had survived.

I couldn’t remember details of her private life, but I seemed to remember it was fairly rackety. A couple of marriages, as she’d just confirmed. Certainly, a few high-profile lovers. Amongst them, I now knew, Niall Connor, to whom she owed the dubious gift of Alexandra. What else? Even more, I wished I’d at least read the Wikipedia entry.

‘We need more whiskey,’ Ingrid announced, reaching out for my glass. Her own was empty.

I downed the remaining contents and handed mine across. I’m not the sort to get into competitive drinking but I knew refusal might threaten the atmosphere of intimate chat that was building up between us.

‘You’ve never smoked?’ she called across from where she was pouring the drinks.

‘No. Didn’t like the taste, while all my contemporaries were looking dead sophisticated with fags drooping out of their mouths. I looked even less confident with a cigarette than I did without one.’ I didn’t add that I was grateful that I’d never started. Didn’t want to sound pious.

‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ said Ingrid, handing me a nearly full tumbler of Jameson’s. ‘People often ask me what it feels like waking up in a war zone, not knowing if I’ll still be alive at the end of the day. And I tell them, “It’s all right, so long as I can get a cigarette first thing.”’

The words would have sounded boastful from most people but, coming from her, they didn’t. She had lived that life and was justified in talking about it.