He ate a proletarian breakfast of sausage and onions and then went out to get the morning papers, since Kim still hadn’t phoned back. The idle sod liked lolling in the bath, but he was really taking his time today. Maybe he was angrier than Will had realised. Maybe he didn’t want to call back.

Or maybe he knew he’d slipped up and didn’t want to admit it. I might be able to prevent Chingford swinging...

Will went through the morning papers in an effort not to think about it. With a thrilling Murder in High Life to promote but nothing new to report, the editors had fallen back on character studies. All the papers were using the same photograph of Fairfax, a studio portrait that Will suspected had been taken a while ago, since he didn’t look the reported age of fifty-two. Will studied the bland, smiling face, wondering what it hid. He couldn’t see any signs of villainy there, or in the basic information the papers provided on the dead man. A financier for various businesses; early retirement on comfortable private means. No skeletons in the closet, no revealing information. Damn.

Far more interesting was the double-page spread in the Daily Mail on the Secretan family. Will read it with guilty fascination, and an uncomfortable awareness that he was learning things Kim hadn’t chosen to tell him.

The family was ‘troubled’, ‘difficult’, ‘dogged by misfortune’. There were a few paragraphs on various ancestors who had outraged sensibilities, morals, laws, and, in the case of the one with a pet lion, common sense. It said Kim’s mother Lady Flitby had died of childbed fever after giving birth to the youngest brother, Henry. Lord Flitby had apparently been unmoved by the loss of his wife, but Henry’s death in 1917 had devastated him. He was considered remote, stern, and autocratic even by the standards of the nobility.

The Mail wrote about the Marquess with a respect they didn’t extend to his surviving offspring. Lord Chingford was the subject of two columns on his notorious bad temper and worse manners. He had two failed engagements, one to an American heiress in 1920 that had lasted six days, the other in 1923 to a duke’s third daughter that had survived a full month. Both had been terminated when the ladies decided that the coronets weren’t worth the husband they came with. That was supported with a few quotes from ‘friends’ that added up to a portrait of a man with more pride than brains and a very short fuse. Will wondered how many future members of the jury would be soaking this stuff up.

And then there was a piece on Kim.