“To Florrie Jacobs. She was in the millinery department with me at Liberty’s. Awfully pretty. I never met him—nobody did, she never so much as mentioned a gentleman friend at work—but all the newspapers are using a studio photograph of him, and it’s the one Florrie had on her mantel at home. I came round to her lodgings once or twice when she had ’flu, you see, and she told me all about it in confidence when she was feeling very low. Poor girl, she wasn’t supposed to talk about him to anyone because he’d said he was going to divorce his wife for her, and if people found out about her, she might end up in court and he didn’t want that. So she had to keep quiet till he was ready, he said, and she did. She wasn’t very bright.”

“Fairfax divorced in 1920, but there’s no record of a second marriage,” Kim said. “Where is this woman now?”

“We lost touch when I left Liberty’s to go to Villette. I did hear she’d gone off to get married, though I don’t know if it’s true.”

“An unofficial marriage, a second name...a second home?” Kim said. “One where he could keep his papers. A secret life—Maisie, you are a miracle. Can you find her?”

Maisie blinked. “Me?”

“You know her, you know who she mixed with. You’ll have contacts and friends who might talk. Use them.”

“Oh, darling, we can, can’t we?” Phoebe said. “Surely.”

“I suppose we can try.” Maisie’s eyes were bright with excitement. “Might it really be important?”

“If we can steal a march on the police and the Bureau? I will shower you in diamonds and take you to the Italian Riviera.”

“You will do no such thing, Kim Secretan,” Phoebe said. “Keep your hands where they belong. When shall we start?”

“Now.” Kim was quivering with barely suppressed tension, a greyhound desperate for the traps to open. “Whatever you can find, whatever you need to put in motion. Find her.”

“He meant to say please,” Will said.

“We know,” Phoebe assured him. “Suppose we go and start looking, and meet you for dinner—”

“Will here do? I can’t go out to eat with my brother arrested for murder.”

“Nonsense, darling, we’ll have a private room at the Savoy. I shall order one for, shall we say eight? And then we can catch up properly.”

The ladies departed in a flurry of expensive swishy material. Will looked at the shut door and said, “Bloody hell.”

“What part?”

“All of it. What do you think about this? Do you really reckon he was Virgo?”

“I’ll be damned disappointed if he wasn’t.”

“And does that make it any less likely Chingford killed him?”