Audrey smiled with the corners of her mouth tucked inwards. She was pleased with this evidence of Jack’s concealment. It linked the two of them against me, like his sneaking away to Turnmill Street after school.

I kept my voice light. ‘Well, that’s fine. It’s Audrey’s picture. You should have mentioned it to me, though, Jack. I was worrying about how I could have been so careless with it.’

‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

‘More coffee, Audrey? I’ve got my father’s volumes of notes upstairs, with all his formulae written out. We could look through them and see if we can find your perfume.’

Audrey’s tongue touched the outer corner of her mouth, where face powder still clung to the dark hairs of a faint moustache.

‘It’s just a bottle of scent,’ she said. ‘What would I need scent for, these days?’

I didn’t quite believe in her dismissal. If it was just a bottle of scent, why had she taken the trouble to bring it to show me?

‘Jack? You know those books of Grandad’s? Will you bring them down for me?’

He slouched away. Given the pace at which Jack usually moved, it would be several minutes before he reappeared.

‘I took your advice,’ I said smoothly, ‘and looked up Ted’s record. It turned out that the local paper was the simplest way. The Hendon & Finchley Times.’

Her face still did not flicker. ‘So now you know your father was a criminal. Does it make anything any different?’

‘No, not really.’ As I had told Mel, I was in the dark. I was sure Audrey could have illuminated matters for me, but I was just as sure she was choosing not to. The scent of her hostility, drifting between us again, was much stronger than the faded residue of roses caught in her little flacon.

Jack came back with the books. I opened the first one and turned the handwritten pages, searching for the long formula labelled ‘A’. ‘Here it is.’ I pointed. And Audrey leaned forward to look, then reached into her handbag and brought out a pair of spectacles. There, I thought. You do want to see it, don’t you?

But after a moment’s scrutiny she took off her glasses and sat up straight. She drained the last of her coffee and replaced the cup firmly in its saucer. ‘It doesn’t mean a thing to me.’

The ambiguity was deliberate, of course. Either she couldn’t decipher what the list of essences meant, or she was pretending indifference.