‘Tell me what you’re going to tell me,’ Lorna said.

‘We were in the middle of the dinner and I got a work call. The reception was cat so I had to go all the way outside. When I step back in, I’m making my way down the hall to the little lobby, which I can see is empty but for Lydia Healy, stood up at the reception desk with her back to me. There was no one at the desk and I figure, well, she’s rung the bell and she’s just waiting for someone to come out to her. Next thing, though, Lydia takes a look one way, then the other and darts in behind the desk and starts rifling through whatever’s behind there. I can’t see because the counter was blocking, but whatever she was looking for she was looking for it very methodically and very urgently.’

‘What was she doing? Was she looking for money?’ Lorna asked.

‘I don’t think they keep money behind the reception desk; even ten years ago almost everyone was paying by card. I always thought she must have been looking for keys to a room.’

‘Why? To take something from one of the rooms? Maybe she ­was—’ Lorna was going to say ‘having an affair’. Waiting for the reception desk to be unmanned, then grabbing a key card for an illicit quickie with her lover. But this was a preposterous scenario. Lydia Healy? Having a tumultuous affair? A woman who, when you looked at her, made you think of terms like beetling and doughty, words that were archaic and obscure and cumbersome and probably didn’t even mean what you thought they meant.

‘Maybe she was a kleptomaniac,’ Lorna suggested instead. ‘Stealing just to steal. Saw a chance and couldn’t help herself.’

‘I don’t know if she even took anything from the desk,’ Anne said. ‘I was coming down the hall and she looked up. It was too late for me to turn back. She saw me coming and she must have been thinking, that’s it, I’m caught, only I was too embarrassed to say anything so I lowered my eyes and just walked on by like she wasn’t there . . . She ended up in a group I was chatting with later that night and of course she acted, and I acted, like nothing had happened.’

‘What else could you do?’

‘Anyway. That’s all there was to that story. But that was the first thing that came to mind when you asked me what I thought about poor Lydia Healy, God rest her.’

The women stopped walking. Ahead of them a couple of gulls were picking their way through the surf, long yellow beaks jabbing at the sand. One of them flashed the amber bead of its reptilian eye in the direction of the women and flounced its wings, once, a single pronounced whump.