She looked at him then more closely. Before, her attention had been on the brown-limbed children in the orchard, checking their safety, enjoying the fun.

“I’ve met you before, haven’t I?” she said. “It’s Mr. Palmer-Jones.”

“Yes.” He was not surprised that she had remembered him. She had been an attentive hostess. She would do everything well. “I worked occasionally with your husband.”

“Duncan isn’t here,” she said. “He says he’s sorry to be away for Philip’s birthday, but I think he’s rather glad. He finds the chaos a little daunting. He’s in Cornwall, and he couldn’t have come home even if he’d wanted to. There was some sort of accident, apparently, and the police have asked him to stay.”

“I know,” George said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Oh,” she said vaguely, “ Don’t you work for the police? I remembered Duncan’s saying.” She looked at him anxiously, too polite to say that George looked too old to be a policeman.

“No,” George said. “Not the police. The Home Office.”

“So you’re involved with the investigation into the accident?”

He did not answer directly. “It wasn’t an accident,” he said. “ It was murder.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Duncan is all right?” Yet, even in her anxiety, she maintained her composure.

“Yes,” he said, “ Duncan is fine. But I should like to ask you some questions. The police will be coming to talk to you, too. I’m not here in any official capacity. There’s no reason why you should talk to me, but I’ve been asked by the parents of the boy who died to look into his death. They feel the police in Cornwall are a bit remote. I was on the boat, you see.”

“But why are you here? I can’t help you.”

He shrugged. “ I had to come to Bristol to see Mr. and Mrs. Franks, and this is on the way back to Porthkennan.”

Parents began to arrive then to collect the children. George stood beside Anne James as she cut the cake and wrapped it in kitchen paper. She handed it out to them with little presents in silver paper decorated with ribbon. The adults gathered sticky and excitable children to them and drove off in expensive cars. When the lawn was empty and Lucy and Philip, shouting the last impatient goodbyes, had been released back to the orchard, Anne led him to a white garden bench in the shadow of a yew hedge.

“Is Duncan in some sort of trouble?” she asked. She was more intelligent than he had realised.

“I don’t know,” he said. It was hard to imagine Duncan James, upright and respectable, in trouble of any kind.

“There must be something,” she said, “or you’d not have come here.”