She would go after she’d finished work, she decided, and then realised she didn’t have the diary with her. It would have to be the following day, Saturday – not a day she generally went to the shop. She could go in the morning and try to blag her way into the house, using the diary as bait. It wouldn’t be her finest hour, preying on defenceless old ladies, but needs must, and anyway, she wasn’t intending any harm to Evelyn. She just wanted the chance to talk to her. Old women liked to talk; she knew this. So hopefully Evelyn would welcome the opportunity. She would have to pretend she hadn’t actually read the diary, though, which would make questioning her difficult. Pip shook her head. She was a barrister, for goodness’ sake. What she didn’t know about getting information out of witnesses wasn’t worth knowing. How hard could it be to get a lonely old lady to engage in a touch of nostalgic chat?

Pip busied herself amongst the racks of clothes so she wouldn’t trigger Audrey’s idleness radar. Since getting over her feelings of revulsion at handling the cast-off clothes of strangers, she was able to find a kind of affection for these pre-owned, pre-loved things. Sometimes, to pass the time, she even imagined little backstories for the garments, trying to picture the people who had bought them, worn them for something special and then passed them on to be worn and loved by someone else. She didn’t want to buy the clothes herself but perhaps she could understand the process a little more. It was as if her sharp edges were being gradually smoothed, just as the perpetual rush of the sea smooths a jagged rock face.

Pip tried to visualise Nicholas Mountcastle. He had been quite tall and rangy, although most people would look rangy when standing next to Audrey. His hair was the colour of gingerbread and long enough to reveal curls. He’d worn it pushed away from his forehead, which made his face look very long, too, and his nose matched. In fact, that was Pip’s overall impression of him – long. Did he look like Evelyn, she wondered? It was hard to say what the woman in the window had looked like at all, let alone whether there was a family resemblance.

He’d been quite desperate to get the diary back, she thought, which either meant he felt bad at losing it or Evelyn was formidable and he was scared of her. From the way he had spoken to Audrey, Pip had the impression that it might be the latter, but this didn’t quite chime with her own impression of Evelyn. Maybe she’d hardened in the years since Scarlet’s death, though. Perhaps she had grown into a bitter spinster, surrounding herself with cats and rebuffing any offers of help or compassion.