But Alex had never made any physical approach to her at all, not since the time she’d demanded why he hadn’t made love to her and he’d admitted he was turned off by her fragility, tried to kiss her ‘just to see’ and she’d ordered him away, because she was not fragile. Small, okay. Weak — yes, in the past, and even just last year, with the glandular fever — but that was steadily decreasing, even if far more slowly than she liked. But she was never fragile, never had been fragile . . . and Alex must have noticed that she and William didn’t share the body language of lovers, as well as William’s use of the second bedroom which, okay, might have been just to store his stuff but wasn’t.

Why!!!!????

She thrust away the suspicion that William was just grateful to her for standing by him after the disgrace of the inquest, his involvement in the manslaughter of Ignatius Mervyn, his tactical resignation from the police force before any formal internal investigation of his professional misconduct. It had been Scarlett who had persuaded him to come back to Gibber’s Creek, to face the gossip, even to get the part-time work at the Whole Australia Factory.

You didn’t kiss a girl — not like he had done — just because you were grateful. Then why hadn’t he done it again?

Maybe she should set the table with candles tonight; put on her favourite mood-music tape; call the florist for a dozen rose petals so she could sprinkle a helpful path from the table to her bed . . .

. . . except that wouldn’t work either, since Alex was coming for dinner. Bloody Alex too, except she didn’t want him, she wanted William, and . . ..

She looked around as she heard the key in the door. William filled the doorway, textbooks in one arm, a shopping bag over the other. ‘Hi. How was your day?’

She kept her voice neutral. ‘Fine. Interesting. I found urethral scarring in Dr Fisher’s corpse — you know, that nice man who used to give a guest lecture on frontal lobotomies once a year and left his body to the uni. The hospital said he died of kidney failure, but the urethral scarring was so severe he’d have had almost complete urinary retention and it was post-surgical too after a prostatectomy . . .’

Scarlett felt complacent once again at the memory. ‘The prof was delighted. There may be a paper in it for him and he said I can be an associate author, plus Dr Fisher was his friend and would have been thrilled that someone found something significant from his corpse.’

William frowned as he too poured himself a cordial. ‘Why is it significant?’

‘Because no one thought that post-surgical urethral scarring could cause kidney failure. If they had, they could have put him on a catheter and saved his life.’

William looked stricken. ‘The poor man lost his life for nothing?’