With agonizing difficulty, I stopped myself from prompting him.

After a long silence, Ben finished his sentence. ‘… we both feel we need a little space at the moment.’

My heart sank. When speaking of relationships, ‘space’ is never a good word to hear.

The conversation with my son ended unsatisfactorily. He got jokey and evasive. As he had with that riff about fish and pebbles. Not to put too fine a point on it, he got manic. Which is always worrying. As it had with his father, the manic phase is always followed by something worse.

I tried to persuade Ben to come down to Chichester, just for a few days, a break. But he said he was far too busy with the deadline he’d got on his ‘Riq and Raq’ project. Then, with an almost brusque ‘Lots of love, Ma’, he rang off.

My instinct was to ring him straight back, but I curbed it. Ben was a grown-up now. Even though I knew his terrible vulnerability, I must never try to reattach the apron strings. If he felt the need to come and chill out with me for a few days in Chichester, fine. But I couldn’t force the decision on him.

I felt predictably restless when I got home. I’ve got a substantial collection of recorded medical soaps which I watch in my rare moments of mindless downtime, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything like that. I was preoccupied, not only by suspicions of Alexandra Richards, but now by worries about Ben too.

For a long time after Oliver’s death, I hid away all his artwork, but gradually I’d been hanging up more of his framed cartoons. There was a particular favourite ‘Riq and Raq’ strip in the hall. As I looked at it, along with my anxiety about Ben, I also felt pleasure that he was using his father’s work as a springboard for his own creativity. But the anxiety was stronger.

I went through to the kitchen and poured a large glass of Merlot. I’d restrained myself with Niall Connor’s excellent wine at lunchtime, but now I thought I deserved a drink.

Just as I raised the glass to my lips, my mobile rang. It was Alexandra. ‘Did you go and see my father?’ she asked.

‘The fact that you ask that question,’ I said, ‘means you know I did.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘Did he say anything about me?’

She sounded so needy, it got me thinking about her relationship with Niall. He had a long history of neglecting his daughter. ‘I’ve never seen much of my father,’ as she’d said bleakly at our first meeting. Was it possible that Ingrid Richards’ death might bring them closer together? If it did, the impression I’d got of Niall Connor’s selfishness did not allow me to think the rapprochement would last for long.

‘Yes, your name came up, obviously.’

‘What did he say about me?’

I wasn’t about to pass on his remark about her parents having got the family’s allocation of good looks. Nor his scepticism about her ability to help organize the memorial service. I said, ‘He asked if you knew about the memoir Ingrid was writing.’