Inside the cabinet there were two shelves. On the bottom one were the items Rowland had evidently purchased: five cans of tomato soup, several cans of tuna fish, an unopened package of instant five-minute rice, some breakfast cereal, marmalade, and jam. On the upper shelf were articles evidently purchased by Sylvie and perhaps by her predecessors—some of it looked dusty, sad, as if neglected for months, or even years. There was a large bottle of very expensive virgin olive oil, a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, a can of pâté de foie gras, some raspberry vinegar, some green peppercorns, and a little pot of musty Provençal mixed herbs.

“You don’t have any eggs, do you, Rowland? Sorry, what did you just say?”

“Letitia,” he said, fetching eggs, then sitting down again, apparently now happy to let Lindsay get on with it, as she much preferred. “All right, so no one else spotted the similarity, but she must have. She bought couture. Surely she must have noticed that the hot new Paris designer had produced a dress identical to the one made for her ten years before?”

“No. Because she gave up all that after her first husband died. She stopped going to the collections. She stopped buying couture. She would have heard of Cazarès by the time I interviewed her, obviously. But she wouldn’t have seen the Harper’s Bazaar picture of that actual dress. I keep telling you, Rowland. It’s an American publication. If she’d known, she’d certainly have told me. I’m certain she had no idea… Rowland, don’t watch me when I cook. It puts me off.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t really watching you. I was thinking. Staring into space. Are you going to scramble those eggs? I like scrambled eggs.”

“Yes, I am,” said Lindsay, breaking eggs into a bowl. “It’s going to be a hodgepodge. A Tom sort of meal. And it’s going to be damn difficult scrambling eggs in this thing. They’ll stick. The bottom of the pan’s all wobbly. Don’t watch.”

Obligingly, Rowland averted his eyes.

“The dates fit,” he went on in a thoughtful way, “the ages fit. Lazare’s—what? Almost fifty? And Cazarès never reveals her age, but she must be in her forties, even if she looks younger. If she was sixteen or seventeen in 1966, that would make her around forty-five or forty-six now. Possible?”

“Yes. Insofar as you can tell from one glimpse on a runway twice a year. When she’s heavily made up, and darts away again as quickly as possible.”

“It would explain a good deal,” Rowland went on. “The accent Lazare has, for a start; a New Orleans French accent is very strange. Presumably Cazarès managed to eradicate hers—but then, she was better educated than her brother. More important, it explains the pathological secrecy, of course. The deliberate laying of false trails. Can you imagine it, Lindsay, if it’s true? All those years pretending they were not related, desperately hiding that one central truth from the world?”

“No, I can’t,” Lindsay said. “But I know it would be horrible—corroding. And they weren’t just disguising the fact that they were related. They were lovers as well as brother and sister. If the rumors can be believed, they’re lovers still.”