“I was in despair,” Cordelia replied defensively. “You’d walked out on me. I didn’t know where you were, or even if you were still alive, for God’s sake. My work had come to an abrupt full stop. When Mary’s manuscript arrived, it was like manna from heaven. Her covering letter emphasized how secret it was, and that I’d have to change the names to protect people. So I changed the title as well, as extra insurance.”

“I don’t think she meant you to change the name of the author to Cordelia Brown,” Lindsay said savagely.

“I know what I did was wrong. But I thought I was safe. If anyone had ever got any solid information and questioned me, I would have admitted that I had based Ikhaya Lamaqhawe on Mary Nkobo’s story, but that I had rewritten her prose completely. No one could prove otherwise.”

“Or so you thought. Jesus, Cordelia, how on earth could you have believed you’d get away with it?”

Cordelia shrugged wearily. “I don’t know. By the time I saw how stupid I’d been, I’d gone too far. The book was already with the publishers.”

“And then Anisha’s letter turned up. It couldn’t have gone to a worse person, from your point of view, could it?”

“You have no idea what it was like,” Cordelia complained. “Alison was such a bitch.”

“Oh, I know exactly what a bitch Alison could be. The difference is that I didn’t kill her for it. Why in God’s name didn’t you call her bluff? Why was it necessary to strangle the life out of her?” Lindsay pursued.

Cordelia got to her feet and poured herself a drink from the decanter left out from the previous evening. “I didn’t set out to kill her,” she defended herself. “I’d already had one meeting with her and she’d played with me like a cat with a mouse. She threatened that if I didn’t do as she told me, she’d expose me. Not just expose me, but, as she put it, ‘give Splash Gordon the story of her life.’ She was going to wait until you reappeared then pass all the information on to you and let you deliver the coup de grâce’’

“She always did have a good line in poetic justice,” Lindsay said cynically, to cover the feelings of sympathy that, in spite of herself, she found rising for Cordelia. “So what exactly were her demands?”

“She wanted all the money from the book. I could just about have lived with that if she’d been going to donate it to some charity, but she wanted it all for herself.”

“Your charitable impulses are very commendable, if lacking in credibility,” said Lindsay sarcastically. “And that was all?”

“Oh no. She wanted me to go to bed with her.”