‘Oh, that was a mistake. I ought to have known it was a mistake from the start. But Lindsay seized on the idea so eagerly, you see. She wanted to say thank you to Miss Shepherd for helping her to get Luanne. I told Lindsay that she should be thankful for what she had and put all the stuff in Bulgaria behind her. But it became almost an obsession with her. You know what women can be like. Well, that was what our daughter was like, anyway. Once she got an idea into her head, it couldn’t be shifted.’

‘So you set up a meeting?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must have had some way of getting in touch with Miss Shepherd, then.’

‘There was an email address. It was one of those free web-based accounts where you don’t have to give any details of your identity to sign up. You only have to provide a name, but you can make that up. Everyone does it.’

‘I see. Well, we’d like that email address, please, sir.’

‘I’ll find it for you. You know, I don’t think she can have checked her email very often. It took her some weeks to reply to my message. In fact, I suspected she wasn’t going to respond at all. I thought she must have changed her email account, or died even. I didn’t know, at the time.’

‘You weren’t aware that Miss Shepherd was living nearby?’

Lowther laughed. ‘No, that was the amazing thing. But she didn’t know Britain very well, so this might have been the first place she thought of. Ironic, isn’t it? I was stunned when she suggested meeting in Matlock Bath. In my own mind, I’d been thinking of a city somewhere, maybe even London. The anonymity of crowds, you know. But apparently she didn’t travel very far once she got into that house at Foxlow.’

‘She told you where she lived, then? Was that information in her email, or did she tell you when you met her in the Riber Tea Rooms?’

‘Neither,’ said Lowther. ‘No, she didn’t give away anything like that. I read about the house in Foxlow in the papers, and then saw it on the TV news. As I said, I was stunned. To think Miss Shepherd was only a few miles away from us. Do you think it was deliberate on her part, to move into Derbyshire?’

‘We don’t know. But there are a lot of things we don’t know about Rose Shepherd.’

‘I can’t help you very much, I’m afraid. She didn’t share any information about her private life.’

‘Talking about sharing information – Mr Lowther, why didn’t you come forward and tell us you knew Rose Shepherd when you heard the news about her death?’