‘Yes. Fine. And yes, Ellen,’ she said wearily, as if by rote, ‘I am very grateful to you for putting up the deposit so I could buy the place.’

Of course, that wasn’t why I’d mentioned it. But Juliet always had been hypersensitive to anything she might interpret as criticism.

I knew I wasn’t going to get any further in terms of rapprochement. That day. One day maybe …? I wasn’t holding my breath.

‘Anyway, you’d better get off to your fashion show or whatever it is.’

‘Sure. Good to hear you, Ellen.’

‘You too, Jools.’

I had cut out and kept the Ingrid Richards obituaries. I went back through them. I don’t know what I was looking for but had the nagging feeling I was missing something.

The post-mortem findings showed that Ingrid Richards had ingested Zopiclone. Having lived with someone who was a suicide risk, I couldn’t put her in the same category. Like me, Ingrid didn’t have a self-harming bone in her body. Her energy and, yes, lust for life made such an outcome impossible. Which meant her death must have been murder.

Since I had first reached that conclusion, her daughter had been shaping up as the prime suspect. But now Alexandra herself had turned the spotlight on to her ‘new man’, Walt Rainbird.

His presence in Brunswick Square on the night of Ingrid’s death was, at the very least, surprising. From what Alexandra had said, she had not even mentioned her mother’s existence to him. So, he must either have done some research through his girlfriend’s papers, or possibly followed her car that evening from Hastings to Hove.

Walt was an arrogant little tick who prided himself on being able to sort out Alexandra’s problems for her. But would he have gone as far as eradicating what he saw as her main problem, her mother? Did he perhaps have murderous bones in his body?

Before I pursued that line of enquiry, though, I wanted to find out more about Ingrid Richards’ life and career. Hence the obituaries.

One detail which hadn’t registered with me before was that Ingrid had come from a very wealthy family. Her father had made a great deal of money in property, buying cheap during World War II, and watching the profits accumulate thereafter. He’d died in the 1970s, though Ingrid’s mother had survived till 2016. Ingrid was an only child, so presumably the legacy which Alexandra received was a considerable one. Why the money had skipped a generation and not gone to Ingrid herself, I don’t know. Perhaps she had disapproved of how her father made his money and wanted nothing to do with it? Too independent to be funded by inheritance? She’d wanted everything she possessed to be the product of her own efforts?

Or maybe she had persuaded her mother to draw up a will that would fund her granddaughter for life? Thus freeing Ingrid to wash her hands of that responsibility? As she had, it must be said, washed her hands of many of her other maternal obligations.