Audrey gave a cackle of laughter. ‘You don’t say.’ She wiped her eyes, seemingly in real amusement, then she sighed and sat down again. ‘Oh, but they were good days, you know. The best. No one knew how to have a good time quite the way Ted did. I remember once he took me to Paris. It was a big thing in those days, overnight on the Golden Arrow from Victoria and the sleeper carriages went down into the hold of the Channel ferry with everyone fast asleep all the way, except I was too excited to lie in my bunk. I pulled the blind up to look out and I saw the sailors working in their thick jerseys. And when we got there we stayed in a hotel that seemed all gilt and ormolu, and we went to a meeting with a fragrance house in the rue de Rivoli. Ted bought me a little suit, houndstooth check, specially for it.’

‘When was this?’

Jack was less interested in these reminiscences. He stood up and sloped across to the back door. ‘Can I go out in the garden?’

‘The key’s in the lock,’ Audrey told him. He went outside and his shadow flicked across the dirty glass of the window.

‘It must have been, let’s see, 1958 or so.’

Before my mother died. Audrey saw me making calculations and coolly amended, ‘Or thereabouts. I can’t really remember. It’s a very long time ago and Ted and I knew each other for many years.’

I said coolly, ‘I didn’t know you were a girlfriend of Ted’s. I met most of them.’

Audrey sat up straight, drawing her knees and ankles together, and looking down her nose at me. My inference had offended her. ‘I wasn’t his girlfriend.’

‘I see.’ Although I didn’t. ‘Sorry.’ She wanted me to think she had been a business associate, was that it? Travelling to Paris together to visit a fragrance house, Ted in one of his well-cut suits and Audrey in her little check costume. Now here she was, holed up with her cats in the dusty innermost recess of a decaying house while the rest of the world planted window boxes and put up roman blinds. And Ted himself was dead. It was a pathetic picture and I regretted my lack of warmth for her.

Then Audrey gave another cackle of laughter. ‘You don’t know much about your dad.’ It wasn’t a question. I could only shake my head in agreement. ‘He never let the wind blow on you, my girl. Went to great lengths to shield you, he did.’

I looked her in the eye. Her gaze didn’t flicker. There was nothing in the least pathetic about Audrey, I now decided. She had almost certainly told Jack the plain truth when she announced that she did what she liked.