Isis offered me a seat at the plastic garden table and then, muttering under a breath, collected up Beverley’s discarded clothes, folded them neatly and draped them over a drying rail by the back door. Oxley and Beverley had been out of sight for more than a minute. I looked at Isis, who seemed unperturbed.

‘They’re going to be at least another half-hour,’ she said, and made us tea. I kept an eye on the water as she bustled but there weren’t even bubbles. I told myself they must have swum out of the pool and surfaced beyond the trees somewhere but I wasn’t very convincing, even to myself. She gave me the now standard assurances as she poured and offered me a slice of Madeira – I said no thank you. I asked her if she remembered a Henry Pyke. She thought the name was familiar.

‘I’m certain there was an actor of that name,’ she said. ‘But there were always so many actors, so many beautiful men. My good friend Anne Seymour had a mulatto footman who could have been your brother. He was a terror for the kitchen maids.’ She leaned forward and looked me in the eyes. ‘Are you a terror for the kitchen maids, Peter?’

I thought of Molly. ‘I’d have to say no,’ I said.

‘No, I can see that,’ she said, and sat back in her chair. ‘He was murdered,’ she said abruptly.

‘The footman?’ I asked.

‘Henry Pyke. Or that was the rumour. Another victim of the notorious Charles Macklin.’

‘Who was he?’

‘A most terrible Irishman,’ said Isis. ‘But a splendid actor. He’d killed a man once already at the Theatre Royal in a dispute about a wig, stabbed him in the eye with his cane.’

‘Lovely,’ I said.

‘Had that Irish temper, you see,’ said Isis. Macklin had been a successful actor in his youth who retired in his prime to run a gin house which promptly went out of business. Forced back on to the boards, he was an ever-popular fixture at the Theatre Royal. ‘They loved him there,’ said Isis. ‘You always saw him in his favourite seat in the pit just behind the orchestra. I remember Anne liked to point him out.’

‘And he killed Henry Pyke?’

‘According to the gossip he did, for all that there were half a dozen witness said he did not,’ she said.

‘Were these witnesses friends of Macklin?’

‘And admirers too,’ said Isis.

‘Do you know where Henry Pyke is buried?’ I asked.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It was just a bit of scandal at the time. Though I would have thought St Paul’s, since that would have been the proper parish.’

She meant St Paul’s Covent Garden, of course – the Actors’ Church. Things kept coming round to that one bloody spot.