“He might be embarrassed to tell you,” Annie suggested.

“I’m sure we’d have known.”

Annie changed tack and made a note to look into Luke’s love life, or lack of it, later, if necessary. “I don’t know how to put this any more diplomatically,” she said, “but I understand you’re not Luke’s biological father, Mr. Armitage?”

“True. He’s my stepson. But I’ve always thought of him as my own son. Robin and I have been married ten years now. Luke has our family name.”

“Tell me about Luke’s father, Mrs. Armitage.”

Robin glanced over at her husband

“It’s all right, darling,” Martin Armitage said. “It doesn’t bother me if you talk about him, though I can’t quite see the point of all this.”

Robin turned back to Annie. “Actually, I’m surprised you don’t know already, given the inordinate amount of interest the gutter press took in the whole affair at the time. It’s Neil Byrd. I thought most people knew about Neil and me.”

“Oh, I know who he was and what happened. I just don’t remember the details. He was a pop singer, wasn’t he?”

“A pop singer? He’d have been disgusted to hear himself called that. He thought of himself more as a sort of modern troubadour, more of a poet than anything else.”

From singer-songwriter to footballer, Annie thought, the way Marilyn Monroe went from baseball player to playwright. There was clearly more to Robin Armitage than met the eye. “Please excuse my ignorance and refresh my memory,” she said.

Robin glanced out of the window, where a large thrush had found a worm on the lawn, then sat down beside her husband. He took her hand as she spoke. “You’re probably thinking it seems like an odd combination,” she said. “But Neil was the first man not to treat me like a complete moron because of my looks. It’s difficult being…well, you know, looking like I did. Most men are either too scared to approach you or they think you must be an easy lay. With Neil, it was neither.”

“How long were you together?”

“About five years. Luke was only two when Neil walked out on us. Just like that. No warning. He said he needed his solitude and couldn’t afford to be burdened with a family any longer. That’s exactly the way he put it: Burdened.”

“I’m sorry,” said Annie. “What happened? What about your career?”

“I was twenty-five when we met, and I’d been modeling since I was fourteen. It was hard to get my figure back after Luke, of course, and I was never quite the same as before, but I still got work, mostly TV commercials, a small and very forgettable part in a slasher film, part fifteen of some series or other. But why do you need to know all this? It can’t have anything to do with Luke’s disappearance. Neil’s been dead for twelve years.”

“I agree with my wife,” said Martin. “As I said earlier, I can’t see what relevance all this has.”