I told Simone about Katy—it was definitely my turn to do this part. I had expected her to cry, I think, but she didn’t: her head went back a little and the lines in her face seemed to get even deeper, but that was all.

“You saw Katy in class on Monday evening, didn’t you?” I said. “How did she seem?”

Very few people can hold a silence, but Simone Cameron was unusual: she waited, not moving, one arm thrown over the back of her chair, until she was ready to speak. After a long time she said, “Very much as usual. Slightly overexcited—it was a few minutes before she could settle and concentrate—

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but this was natural: she was to leave for the Royal Ballet School in a few weeks. She’d been growing more and more excited about it all summer.” She turned her head away, very slightly. “She missed her class yesterday evening, but I simply assumed she was ill again. If I had rung her parents . . .”

“By yesterday evening she was dead,” Cassie said gently. “There was nothing you could have done.”

“Ill again?” I asked. “Had she been ill recently?”

Simone shook her head. “Not recently, no. But she isn’t a strong child.”

Her eyelids dropped for a moment, hooding her eyes: “Wasn’t.” Then she looked up at me again. “I’ve taught Katy for six years now. For several of those years, beginning when she was perhaps nine, she was ill very often. So was her sister Jessica, but her illnesses were colds, coughs—she, I think, is simply delicate. Katy suffered from periods of vomiting, diarrhea. Sometimes it was serious enough to need hospitalization. The doctors thought it was some form of chronic gastritis. She should have gone to the Royal Ballet School last year, you know, but she had an acute attack at the end of the summer, and they operated on her to find out more; by the time she recovered, it was too far into the term for her to catch up. She had to reaudition this spring.”

“But recently these attacks had disappeared?” I asked. We would need Katy’s medical records, fast.