“So I came away feeling annoyed and upset. I couldn’t understand his attitude to me. Wouldn’t he have been glad to see someone from home, a member of a family he used to know well? And then it hit me. Certain things I’d overheard at home and not understood. Conversations that were broken off when I came into the room. Something my stepfather had said: ‘How long are you going to let this charade continue?’ and ‘Thank God she’ll soon be married off and no longer be your responsibility.’” She paused, staring out blankly past me into the hallway. “I thought he was just being his usual horrible self. But there was that painting in Mr. Bryce’s hallway and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. You know, one of the Angela paintings. It must have been one of the last ones because my aunt Adelaide looks quite grown up. But the problem was it looked so exactly like me that it was frightening. And then I realized the truth about what had happened and why he’d fled to Paris. Aunt Adelaide was really my mother. He must have seduced her and when she found out she was going to have a baby it was too much for her delicate nature. She’d always been naïve and led a very sheltered life. She must have been so overwhelmed that she had a nervous breakdown. And my adoptive mother was the only sister who was married at the time and wanted to have a baby of her own, so I was handed over to her. And everybody who knew kept quiet. But silly Mama must have spilled the beans to my stepfather.”

“I see,” I said. “Yes, that is how it must have been. How very tragic. So you decided to kill your father. To make him pay for what he had done.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I decided to do. If he had welcomed me, told me the truth, wanted me in his life, I might have forgiven him. But that complete and utter rejection—it was too much. There he was, enjoying a good life—rich, famous—when my poor little mother’s life had been ruined forever. I decided that such a man does not deserve to live. I slipped into the hotel kitchen and took a sharp knife and carried it in my purse to my father’s house.”

“And the housekeeper admitted you? Weren’t you scared that she’d be a witness to his murder?”