‘Yes. Maggie had a little girl. It was about twenty years ago now. It wasn’t intended, far from it. Mags was a law student then. She didn’t believe in abortion – a relic of our Catholic upbringing, I’m afraid. So she had the child adopted – there was no way she could have raised her. It would have interfered too much with her plans for her career.’

Fry recalled Maggie’s comments about female police officers, and realized that she had probably been talking about her own situation.

‘And Mags never even achieved what she wanted. She reached a plateau. She ended up in a small town, instead of becoming a partner in a big city firm. And it was a small town no more than ten miles from where we were raised. She is never going to get any further away now. There’s some strange tie that she has to the area, though she would never admit it. She always thought I was the one who would stay around, and I would have agreed with her at one time. But when you reach a certain age you learn things about yourself – you learn that you’re not quite what other people always told you.’

‘Do you think your sister resents not getting further in her career?’

‘Well, I certainly think she started to realize she’d reached that plateau. Of course she did. And she resented the fact that I’d escaped, as she saw it. That I’d left her to look after Mum and Dad. She couldn’t move away then, you see – not without adding to her feelings of guilt.’

‘She doesn’t strike me as someone who feels guilty,’ said Fry.

‘Oh, she’s good at blaming other people. She blames everyone but herself for her lack of real success – her teachers, her colleagues, our parents, me. And any friends she might have left. She was always a difficult person to like, but she became so prickly that people began to leave her well alone.’

‘And the child? Do you think she feels guilty about the child?’

‘Well, what do you think?’ said Catherine brightly. And in that one sentence, Fry was able to fill in the background around her picture of Maggie’s sister – the background was full of children hanging on to her skirt and bringing her their latest treasures to look at. All the children would be little copies of Catherine. Fry nodded at the clarity of the image. The arrival of each child must have been like salt in the wound to Maggie. What was it she had said at Derwent Court the other day? ‘Perhaps I’ll wake up one day and discover I have a maternal instinct after all.’

‘I think, you know,’ said Catherine, ‘that Mags must have been wondering a great deal about the child. Wondering what she would be like now, and where she is. Wondering if she ever thought about her real mother.’