Mary Rolfe was dead. She had died almost a century ago. She had left this house one summer afternoon near the end of the Victorian era and had drowned – or been drowned – in the sea-loch. This personification claiming to be Mary Rolfe could not exist. And yet here was Dr Arnold Bourne, alive and well and living in the late twentieth century, pretending to be a figment of ‘Mary Rolfe’s’ imagination in order to persuade her to confide in him. Was it really possible that in the girl asleep on the couch they had a window into the nineteenth century, that the dead past could be resurrected and contacted?

‘Now why are you unhappy, Mary?’ Bourne’s voice was warm and sympathetic. The bastard would have made a good psychiatrist, Paul thought.

‘He’s gone off me.’

‘Who has?’

‘He says he hasn’t. He says we have to wait longer but I know he’s gone off me.’

‘Mary, you can tell me. Who are you speaking of?’

‘Arthur.’ The voice was a whisper. Startled, the listeners looked at each other in conjecture.

‘You mean . . .’ Bourne hesitated, frowning ‘. . . Arthur Howard?’

‘Yes.’ The word was accompanied by a deep sigh.

‘You believe Arthur Howard was – is – fond of you?’

‘He loved me. He still says he does.’

Bourne, his face blank, wrinkled his brows, uncertain how to proceed.

‘Mary, when did you first discover that Arthur Howard loved you?’

‘It was August. I saw him looking at me. I knew he was interested in me. A girl can always tell. We met several times. In the grounds. Up the glen in the mountains.’ A reminiscent half-smile appeared on the face that was Ann Parish’s and in some strange way was not. ‘He told me how unhappy he was, how he’d never really known what it was to be happy until he was with me. He said how much he needed me.’

Paul thought: that is exactly the way it would have happened if it is true. That is the way Howard would have operated. For it’s the way it did happen generation after generation, even down to our sophisticated seventies.

Now that her reluctance to talk had been overcome, Mary Rolfe required little prompting to relate how the affair had proceeded. Clandestine meetings outside the house, visits to her room – as Mrs Howard’s personal maid, she had a servant’s room to herself – it was clear that Mary had gone at least halfway to meet Howard.

‘Did Mrs Howard not suspect?’ Bourne asked.

‘No.’ The negative was drawn out scornfully. ‘She was too busy with her headaches, and moans about her lost babies and how dreary and lonely it was up here. No. She didn’t know.

‘I don’t suppose she’d really have cared much if she had known. That’s what made it so unfair.’

‘Unfair?’