‘That’s amazing,’ said Trisha, nonetheless impressed, and followed up with the question that was always next, where I got my ideas. That one I always fudged. Michael. Always Michael, and his cruelty, which gave me, not my ideas, but the imaginary world he propelled me into. With a gutsy heroine so different to yours truly; indeed, the woman I wished I was. My fingers would fly over the keys as she got to the bottom of every unsolved police investigation, every injustice, reopening inquiry after inquiry – cold cases being her forte – perhaps on the tearful insistence of some poor family whose child had gone missing years ago; some gap year student who’d never been found. And eventually, of course, Susie does find her, alive and well, and married, incidentally, in Papua New Guinea. Happy, too. Because, it transpires, she’d been desperate to escape the clutches of her controlling mother. The one who’d asked Susie to find her. No, Michael never appeared in my books – or read them, thank the Lord, having given up after erroneously failing to recognize anything of our life together. But the influence was there.

I smiled. ‘Honestly, I have no idea. I think it’s just a process of osmosis, everyday things I pick up subliminally and use in my stories. Things I’m told, maybe – who knows?’ I spread my hands expansively. ‘I expect people ask the same thing about your garden designs, don’t they?’

‘Well, it’s not quite in the same ballpark as yours, creatively, but you’re right, it does all spring from the imagination,’ she admitted with surprise, liking the seriousness with which I’d treated her subject. And I knew I was safe. I’d neatly turned the tables, as I always did, so that whoever had asked the question had forgotten what they’d asked, and taken the baton. But as we drifted into the house, and Trisha explained about one garden she’d done recently for a nightmare client, who basically wanted a mini Highgrove, a series of little rooms, I could feel Josh’s gaze still on me, not so easily diverted.