I took a long, grateful swallow and finally confronted the tangle of thoughts which had been building up in my mind.

The beating-up of Dodge. The identity of his assailant. There was an unpleasant chain of logic developing there, which I didn’t want to confront.

And, of course, Dodge’s unwillingness to get ‘caught up in the system’. That I’m sure was another reaction to the breakdown he’d had which had ended his career in the City. From the minimal information he had volunteered about that time, and from the fact that he now worked as a counsellor for a Portsmouth drug rehabilitation charity called ReProgramme, I reckoned drugs must have been involved. Which would explain his unwillingness to have anything to do with the police. But what his objection to the NHS was, I had no idea. Maybe he’d been scarred by some treatment he’d received and that had turned him against traditional medicine. I had no means of knowing.

I still thought, given the savagery of the attack, the police should be informed. But that argument with Dodge could wait till the morning.

Next on my disturbing thought list was the suspicion that Alexandra Richards might have had a hand in her mother’s death. A thought which had been uncomfortably around since I first heard the news of the fire in Brunswick Square. But which had been given more definite shape by what Niall Connor had said.

With the suspicion came the unpleasant feeling that I might have been set up by Alexandra. That she had only contacted me so I could confirm to the police that Ingrid Richards lived in a firetrap. Which would have cast me in the unenviable role of a pawn in Alexandra’s game of murder.

But, more powerful than all of these was my anxiety about Ben’s mental state. First and foremost, always, I am a mum. And, given the family history with Oliver …

I knew I wouldn’t sleep unaided that night.

I took one of the expired Zopiclones. It worked.

It was a long time since I’d taken a sleeping pill and I woke up muzzy and disoriented. My first thought on hearing someone moving about downstairs was that I’d been burgled. Then the events of the previous evening came back to me. I slipped on my dressing gown and went down.

Dodge was standing in the kitchen, supporting himself against the table. He looked ghastly, the paleness of his face emphasizing the bruises and cuts, from which he had removed the plasters. The redness of his injuries had turned overnight to a kaleidoscope of greens, yellows and purples. He was dressed in his own clothes, which meant he’d been up for long enough to take the washing out of the machine and tumble-dry it.

When I entered the room, he looked away. That moment of eye contact we’d had when he was lying on the ground was not about to be repeated.

‘How’re you feeling?’ I asked.

‘Fine,’ he lied.

‘Did you get any sleep?’