Dear Rose, she wrote. I have also been caught up with Metamuse and I urgently need to know what OJ & RB are doing and what they plan to do next. I believe what you’ve written because I’ve been experiencing it myself. If you read this, please get in touch with me urgently. She left her contact details in the form.

It was close to noon when Suki came into the waiting room, accompanied by a man who couldn’t have been styled any differently from her. Next to the dark, jagged lines of her hair and clothes, the painful sharpness of her necklaces and cuffs and bangles, he was a premonition of a summer’s day. He looked like he’d stepped off a yacht in the Mediterranean, with a healthy tan and an expensively informal cotton shirt and pale-blue linen jacket, not like someone who’d been cowering in the unrelenting gloom for the extent of an English Midlands winter. He was tall and lean and his light-brown hair curled forgetfully on top of his head. But despite their differences, his lucid green eyes and the prepossessing way he held himself identified him as unmistakably a Barlow.

‘Petra, darling,’ Suki said, sweeping across the waiting room to her corner. ‘I’m so sorry. What news of your mum?’

While the man stood a respectful few paces back, Petra gave Suki a rundown of what the doctor had told her earlier. There had been no further change in the course of the morning.

‘Ben’s here,’ Suki said after she’d finished, casually indicating her brother, who stepped forward and took her hand in a practised double-handed, magnet-eyed Carnegie shake.

‘Susan tells me you’ve been wanting to learn more about Curtis Worthing.’ Susan? Petra bit back a laugh and glanced at Suki, who was clenching her jaw. ‘I have some background info that may prove illuminating.’

‘And guess whose name comes up in the story?’ Suki added.

‘Whose?’

‘Olivia Jouval and Rashida Barnes. Small world, right?’

* * *

Suki was pushing a limp tomato around her untouched salad with a five-star scowl on her face, but Ben Barlow had tucked into his hospital-cafeteria burger with surprising relish. If Suki was to be believed, her family commonly feasted on swan cheeks and gold-plated caviar, but uncomplaining consumption of what lay before him was likely a survival instinct ingrained from Ben’s boarding-school days.

He dabbed a dry oven chip into a neat swirl of ketchup. ‘So there’s nothing much to Curtis Worthing. His father was a money man at Jaguar Land Rover, back when it mattered. Curtis attended Barford School and Beauchamp.’

‘What’s Beechum?’

‘The university, darling,’ Suki said. ‘It’s spelled Beauchamp, but we pronounce it Beechum.’

‘Oh, God, I’ve always called it Bo-shump. How embarrassing. Next you’re going to tell me Oxford’s pronounced Coventry.’