I curbed my instinct to defend the late Ingrid Richards.

‘So,’ Alexandra went on, ‘I just sat in the car trying to reconcile these conflicting thoughts and emotions.’

‘How long did you stay there?’

‘Till after midnight, just parked right outside Ingrid’s block.’

‘So, you could see who went in and out of the building?’

‘Exactly, Ellen. That’s what I wanted to tell you. In all the time I was there in the car, no one did go in or out of the building.’

I wondered for a moment why Alexandra had thought it necessary to tell me that. Of course, she didn’t know how her father had stimulated my suspicion of her. Now, telling me she was almost definitely the last person to see her mother alive could only reinforce that suspicion. But then I reminded myself that she had been telling me on Walt’s instructions. And only God knew what kind of power game he might be playing.

I was about to go back into the sitting room when my mobile’s tone told me I’d received a text.

It read: ‘We haven’t met but I think you know who I am. My name’s Tracey. Could we talk?’

SEVENTEEN

I doubt whether filling your son full of whisky and putting him to bed with an expired Zopiclone is recommended practice in most books of parenting. But that’s what I did with Ben on the Sunday evening. As requested by Tracey, I didn’t mention that she was in the area, staying with a schoolfriend near Worthing. Nor that she and I had fixed to meet the following day.

I also contacted Dodge again. He sounded in a bad way. Never one to make a fuss about anything, he did admit that he hadn’t been able to get out of bed since we last saw him. His bruised body had stiffened up and, in spite of his various herbal remedies, he was in a lot of pain. I’m sure it was for that reason that he didn’t raise objections to the plan I suggested for the next day.

Ben was bleary and uncommunicative the following morning. Probably the booze and the sleeping pill. But I did manage to get a cooked breakfast inside him. And quite a bit of black coffee, whose rehydrating effects, as they sometimes can, seemed to make him drunk again. He was almost giggly as I laid out my proposal for his day. But it was a dangerous, edgy kind of giggly. It had always been one of the danger signs when Oliver got like that.

First stop was Homebase to buy paint. I asked if he needed fine art stuff, but Ben said basic house paints would work better. Gloss. He chose the colours with care and got a set of different-sized brushes. He made only token objections to my paying. He agreed he was an impoverished student and I said I was investing in his future. (There was always in the back of my mind the fact that I had provided the deposit for Jools’s flat in Herne Hill and I must at some point make an equivalent amount available to her brother.)