Whereas Niall Connor luxuriated in his enhanced profile.

The big difference between him and Ingrid Richards, however, was that, while she had been a fixture on the television screens of every family in the country, almost all of Niall Connor’s work had been in print. So, though he looked vaguely familiar when I met him, he did not have that Ingrid Richards instant recognition factor.

He must once have been a strikingly attractive man, and wasn’t looking bad in his late sixties. He had the manner of someone who’d never doubted his attractiveness, an arrogance which he had learned to leaven with charm. His hair had all once been black and, though he was greying round the edges and at the back where it nestled on top of his collar, there was still some blackness in the lock that flopped over his forehead. His face was weather-beaten – or life-beaten – but his lips were surprisingly full, almost feminine.

He wore an open-necked denim shirt, under a crumpled linen jacket, frayed round the lapels and cuffs. The bottoms of his jeans were frayed too, drawing attention to the fact that he wore no socks under his faded navy deck shoes. The impression was of shabbiness, but very calculated shabbiness.

The appearance of Grace Bellamy, who had just entered the hall behind her husband, was equally calculated but in a very different way. I know roughly how old she was. Ingrid, after all, had told me she’d written a book about her own menopause. For God’s sake! But Grace had been very expensively buffered against the depredations of age. In fact, she looked as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of a magazine.

Which, of course, in a way, she had. I recognized her much more immediately than I did Niall because, almost as long as I can remember, I’d been reading features by her. Magazines, colour supplements, everywhere. And the centre of them all was her own life. I’d read about her sleep deprivation with a teething baby – clearly from a marriage before her current one – when I was going through the same problem with Juliet. I’d empathized with her difficulties over what to cook when a dinner guest espoused vegetarianism (a much rarer occurrence back then than it is now). I’d disagreed with her over how tight a leash teenage children should be kept on. I’d been given God-knows-how-many collections of her columns as Christmas presents.

No, it was no surprise she’d written a book about her own menopause.

It struck me too that that was why I’d recognized the frontage of the house. I must have seen it in a colour supplement somewhere, no doubt in a feature by Grace Bellamy on ‘Second Home Secrets’.

As I was led through the hall (‘How to Make your Entrance Entrancing’) to the large kitchen at the back of the house (‘By Hook or By Cook’), I was impressed by how long Grace Bellamy had managed to get paid for having opinions about everything.