‘Another man, yes. Why not? A strong imagination can do anything – especially under pressure of nervous possessiveness. Why shouldn’t jealousy be able to body forth a rival, finally make it flesh? That’s by no means the greatest of its marvels. I love the idea myself – I mean as being something quintessentially Hardyish. He was a ghost-ridden man. He often felt that he couldn’t do much more than hover insubstantially himself. I don’t doubt for one moment that he projected that dark stranger into the room, fleshed him out and put him next to Florence.’

I wasn’t sure what I thought of that. Nor was Max. We both made grunting noises. We were only men, after all. We were only the ones who spirited rivals, that’s to say one another, in or out of rooms; we weren’t to be trusted with knowing what we were doing when we did it.

Camilla looked irritated with us both for not rising. If she’d had the power I think she would have dematerialized the pair of us.

‘He doesn’t look to me like someone in possession of strange gifts,’ Max said, coming to a photograph of the old forger in old age.

‘Who’s talking about strange gifts?’ Camilla retorted, angrily.

But Max hated to be interrupted. He could drop his voice and mumble for hours if he wasn’t allowed his say. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘there is some quality of devilish deception in his face. I’d never noticed it before, but he actually looks quite like Dr Crippen.’

‘You’re not the first person to have noticed the resemblance,’ she told him. Rather archly, I thought. Offering him a fight if he still wanted one. Though of course, like all perversely aggressive men, he no longer did. ‘Emma Hardy spotted it before you. At around about the time that Crippen’s face was in all the papers, together with the details of how he murdered his wife and eloped with his secretary, Emma noted the resemblance to Florence – Florence, at this stage, being passed off as a sort of friend to Emma-cum-secretary herself. That particular way of smuggling in a mistress, getting her to feign friendship with your wife, fills me with more than usual abhorrence for husbands, by the way. Emma didn’t think much of it either. Only let’s hope, she said to the wholly humourless Florence, that Tom’s resemblance to the little dentist stops at a facial one, and that I don’t end up dead in the cellars myself one day. She left the further coincidence of secretaries implicit – naturally. And naturally Florence didn’t get the joke. As a rule few people did get Emma’s jokes. It was assumed that the wife of an eminent novelist who didn’t think highly of her husband could only be funny in the sense of peculiar, not funny in the sense of funny.’