He removed the document from his inside pocket and handed it across the desk to her. She studied it for a few seconds, then looked back at him, her demeanour turning slightly defensive. ‘Yes, we drew up this will.’

‘Thank you,’ Grace replied. ‘We think it may be significant in our enquiries that her husband has been excluded and that the principal benefactor is her line manager at the firm where she works, Mutual Occidental Insurance. We appreciate your duty of client confidentiality, but we are in a very serious situation, in which her husband is claiming he’s not seen or heard from Eden since last Sunday afternoon. But the fact is there’s been very little to indicate she is still alive since the previous Thursday, August the twenty-ninth. We are extremely concerned that she may be dead. Or, maybe, she has run away and is pretending to be dead? Any information you can give us would be extremely helpful.’

She opened out her hands and a bunch of bracelets slid, jangling, down her wrist. ‘What information are you looking for from me?’

‘Did this will supersede a previous one?’ Branson asked.

She looked at both officers. ‘I shouldn’t say so, but in light of the gravity of the situation, yes, it did.’

‘The previous one leaving everything to her husband?’ Branson pressed.

‘Pretty much, yes.’

‘You drafted that one, too?’

‘Yes, Mrs Paternoster has been a client for a number of years. Normally any conversations would be subject to client confidentiality, but I am prepared to relax that on this occasion given that I am worried about what might have happened to Eden.’

‘If you can cast your mind back to when she asked to change her will, Ms Riddle,’ Grace asked, ‘did she seem normal to you? Did she say anything by way of explanation? It’s a pretty unusual situation where someone in a marriage changes their will to exclude their partner, isn’t it?’

She smiled sardonically. ‘Not as unusual as you might think. I’m afraid, doing probate, I see it all. Not much surprises me. And – I’m not saying this is the case here – but I’ve known people take masochistic pleasure in deliberately excluding someone who would be expecting an inheritance. They leave it to a dogs’ home or some other charity. I had a client, some years ago, and now long deceased, who left an estate of over £4 million to her cat, just to stop any of her children, whom she’d fallen out with, from benefiting.’

‘So, clearly,’ Grace said, ‘Eden Paternoster didn’t want her husband to benefit. But leaving it to her boss strikes us as strange. Did she say anything to you about her reasons for that?’

He held back on revealing the information his team knew – that Rebecca Watkins was having an affair with Eden’s husband – wanting to hear the solicitor’s reply.

‘She did, yes, she told me her reason. She told me her husband wasn’t very tech savvy. She’d become suspicious that he was cheating on her, after reading texts on his phone. From what she told me it seems she confided in her boss – her line manager, Rebecca Watkins – and one thing had led to another. In a short space of time she realized she had fallen in love with this woman, and this was where her true feelings lay. She told me she felt liberated, as if she’d shaken a monkey off her back.’