Drew had tried to discourage her from phoning so often, which had felt a bit odd at the time, and now escalated into a much bigger deal. It suggested annoyance with her, at the very least. The message seemed to be, You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. He hadn’t wanted her to go off and leave him to cope with his children, and he wasn’t going to pretend to be happy about it. And she had forgotten their anniversary, only a year after marrying him. But then she recalled the whispering between Stephanie and either Timmy or her 152father. Did they perhaps – incredibly −have something secret going on? Had something happened to Hepzie, and they couldn’t bring themselves to tell her? Or was it something nice? A welcome-home present they were making, or a new interest that the children were working on, to surprise her.

None of that entirely explained why they couldn’t take a phone call from her. Drew knew that she was at the centre of another murder investigation – but no, he didn’t. He had not let her talk for long enough to convey the full story. The only thing she’d really been able to say was how sorry she was about the anniversary, and he had brushed that aside as unimportant. The distance between them suddenly felt like a great gulf that he was making no attempt to bridge. A reciprocal annoyance seized her. There was no need for him to be quite so cold, after all. It was bordering on punitive, which was something she would never have expected from him.

It was time to stop all this thinking. There was a whole evening still to get through, with the TV not working and no prospect of any congenial company.

Except – the name she had been resolutely pushing out of her mind forced itself past the barriers she had erected and flashed up in neon lights. Clovis Biddulph had been to this house, looking for her. This was impossible to explain or account for, given the absence of any proper message via the builders.

There was nothing she could do but wait to see if he came back. She had no phone number for him, and 153would have resisted any temptation to call it, even if she had. The very helplessness was anathema to her. She regarded herself as a person who made things happen. She did not sit waiting like a Victorian damsel for a man to confer his attention on her. And yet, that was exactly the situation in this instance. It made her fidgety, after the hour spent in quiet meditation. All that thinking had led nowhere, anyway. Without action, it was meaningless. And without any idea of what that action could or should be, there was a growing feeling of frustration.

Everybody had deserted her. Gladwin, Drew, her dog, even Grace. Well, to be fair, it had been entirely involuntary in the case of the last two. But the result was that she was here on her own, entertaining increasingly dark thoughts, with several hours still to pass before bedtime.