After Aden, either she alone or the two of them would have caught the next boat out, sailing directly to California, no stops along the way—or if she had sailed alone, he would have met her here. They had come to my house by night, aware of the watch-dogs across the street—and as Mr Hammett had pointed out, there was nothing to have kept Greenfield from making a copy—ten copies—of the key before ostentatiously handing the original over to my father back in 1906. (As I worked at my nails with the brush, I made a mental note to have all the locks changed, as soon as possible.) The two of them had spent the daylight hours inside the house searching for anything that might incriminate him; they'd found Father's letter eventually, in the library or my parents' bedroom or in Mother's desk—wherever Father had stashed it before setting off for the Lodge that fateful week-end in 1914. However, the document had led them no closer to the two boxes, and in the end they had given up the search. They had burnt the letter in the fireplace, along with some related newspaper articles, and rested in the beds upstairs until the full moon was bright enough to guide their departing steps. It must have been frustrating, I mused in the cooling water, to know the boxes were out there in the garden, but be unable to locate them.

“Do you think he would have done what he did, had he realised that the entire family was in the car?” This was Long's voice, and the thought gave me pause. Yes, Father's letter had said that he intended to go to the Lodge by himself. He would have told his friends that, and . . . and perhaps I had mentioned to Flo that my father was going but we were not. It was something I would have done—my adolescent self would have complained in either case: If I'd gone, I was being forced to go; if I hadn't gone, I was being left behind. And Flo's father had been in town just then, with a pearl necklace for her fourteenth-birthday present. She could have passed on the information I had provided. . . .

But sooner or later, after Father had died, Greenfield would have returned to silence Mother. He knew his old friend, knew that Charles Russell would have told his wife what he'd found in the back garden. What Greenfield had done later to the others who might have known, the Longs and Dr Ginzberg, proved that sooner or later he'd have come for Mother.