My mind was racing. Thinking, inevitably, of the documentation Niall Connor had mentioned. It appeared that he was not the only person interested in what Alexandra had taken from her mother’s flat. Or could the man going through Alexandra’s papers be acting on Niall’s instructions?

I was undecided for a moment what to do. Almost as soon as we’d met, Alexandra had told me that she lived alone. She’d said she’d probably be out till six thirty. So, it wasn’t unreasonable to conclude that the man in her front room was an intruder.

It would, however, be ridiculous to call the police straight away. I got out my mobile to ring Alexandra. If she didn’t know who the man was, then appropriate action could be taken.

But before I found her number, through the window I saw her enter the front room. Her reaction showed that she did know the man who was checking through her papers but also that she was annoyed with him. Obviously, I couldn’t hear what was being said but the mime I was watching appeared to be of a row. Whether the cause of the row was his interest in her files, I couldn’t judge.

Then the man stood up. He was almost a head shorter than Alexandra. He put his arms round her and kissed her on the lips.

‘Ellen, this is Walt.’

He was once again sitting in front of Alexandra’s desk, with her papers scattered over its surface. I was struck by how in control he seemed in her house. Knees literally under the table. There was about Walt an air of entitlement, even pomposity, at odds with his rather nerdish appearance.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said.

Walt inclined his head condescendingly towards me.

Alexandra seemed unrelaxed, anxious perhaps about how I would react to her friend. ‘I didn’t know Walt was going to be here when I fixed for you to come over.’

‘Well, it’s not a problem, is it?’ he said. ‘I have a key. I can come and go as I please, can’t I?’

‘Yes, of course you can,’ she hastened to assure him.

‘That’s what happens when you’re’ – he did that annoying thing of miming inverted commas for the words – ‘an item.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Alexandra.

‘Well, congratulations,’ I said, ‘on being’ – I felt an unaccountable urge to send Walt up by doing the same mime myself, but I resisted it – ‘an item.’

‘Yes, we’re incredibly lucky,’ said Alexandra. ‘It just happened. We met when Walt came to fix my laptop.’

That fitted. A casting director looking for someone to play a computer repair man would probably have rejected Walt as too obvious.

‘Less than two months ago,’ he said serenely. ‘And we just clicked. Didn’t we, lovie?’

‘Yes, we did, lovie,’ said Alexandra.

This grated on me. What they called each in private was up to them, but I didn’t warm to this public winsomeness. I had very quickly got the feeling that Walt defined the parameters of their relationship. He seemed controlling. Maybe Alexandra was so unused to having someone in her life that she just went along with whatever he wanted.