It had been her comparison exactly: stopping to look at a car crash. “No more than anyone else. I knew Mr. Hawkins. Not well. But I knew him. He was a good boss. Call it a sort of homage, if you will.”

“Homage.” Danvers pronounced the word with great relish and a pronounced French accent. “Yes. Homage. That will do nicely. So it wasn’t anything to do with trying to find out if there was anything, shall we say, suspicious, about his demise?”

“You told me there wasn’t.”

“Indeed we did.”

“There you are, then.”

“And just exactly where are we? You haven’t answered Deborah’s question yet.”

“I think I have. You told me to stay in London. I had nothing better to do, so I thought I’d like to see the damage.”

“How did you know where Mr. Hawkins lived?” Danvers asked.

“I told you. We were all invited to a department mixer there just over a year ago.”

“And you remembered the address?”

“I’m a super-recognizer, Mr. Danvers.” Unfortunately, Zelda thought, that meant she could never forget Deborah’s sour and unappealing face.

“You also have a good memory for places?”

“So it would seem.”

“Why are you so interested?”

“I told you: I was curious. Wouldn’t you be? Your boss dies in a house fire. It’s not something that happens every day.” Zelda was beginning to believe that they hadn’t seen her go into the pub, and she prayed that she was right. That would be harder to explain, especially if they had found out from the young man behind the bar what questions she had asked him. She remembered no one else entering while she was there, except that noisy group of four toward the end. It could be a cover for an NCA spy. And if Danvers’s men had questioned the bartender, he would surely have told them about the photograph she had showed him. She kept her fingers crossed under the table. “You’re taking an undue amount of interest for someone who told me just the other day that there was nothing suspicious about Mr. Hawkins’s death,” she said.

“Situations change,” said Danvers.

“So now you think there was something suspicious? That he was murdered?”

“I’m not at liberty to comment on that. Mr. Hawkins headed an important department involved in some very sensitive work, as you well know. We’d be remiss if we didn’t cover every angle.”

“Including treating one of his department members as a suspect, because I doubt you’re giving the same kind of attention to any of the others. What is it? Is it my background? Because I’m a woman? Because I’m a foreigner? Because I was forced into prostitution? Because I don’t jump every time you tell me to?”

“For God’s sake, you don’t have to play all the special pleading cards in the deck. As far as we know, nobody else from the office paid a visit to Mr. Hawkins’s burned-out house.”

“Well, if that’s all that’s bothering you, I’ve told you: I was curious. They obviously weren’t. I’ll be going now. Goodbye.”