“Hello, darling,” Phoebe said, giving him a kiss. “Sit down, have a drink, and let us tell you all about it. Maisie’s been quite brilliant. Start from the beginning, darling, he needs to know how clever you are.”

Maisie looked immensely pleased with herself. “Oh my goodness, Will, you have no idea how much work that was. I shall never become a private detective. First we asked dozens of milliners about Florrie. Everyone I know, and almost everyone they knew: I think I’ve spoken to half the hat girls in London. And we got nowhere at all. It was extraordinary, as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth. I started to feel quite worried.”

“It was awfully odd,” Phoebe agreed. “I even had dear Harry check that delightful little Devon place for us. You know, where they keep notes on what everybody does.”

“Somerset House,” Kim said. “Births, marriages, and deaths. It’s on the Strand.”

“She knows,” Maisie said. “And Florrie wasn’t registered dead, so we kept on asking. And finally someone said they thought she’d gone to Clapham.”

“Exactly where one would install a mistress,” Phoebe put in. “It’s so perfectly bourgeois.”

“And since that was the best we had, we went to Clapham this morning, to see what we might find out.”

“Just Clapham?” Will said. “That was your only lead?”

“Brace yourself,” Kim told him. “It gets worse.”

Maisie looked remarkably smug. “Well, on the way there, it struck me that she must have needed a black hat. Or at least, she would if she was still with him, and if she wasn’t then it wouldn’t be much use finding her, would it? But even if they hadn’t made it official—”

“—which we thought not, because I went back to Somerset House myself and had a lovely little man check weddings for me under Mr. Fairfax’s other name, whatever it was again, and there wasn’t one—”

“—she would surely do the decent thing. And one wouldn’t want to be trimming and dyeing under those circumstances, would one, or going into Town either, and Florrie would never wear an outdated hat, not for mourning. So we started asking at every milliner’s in Clapham for a very beautiful woman who’d just bought a black hat.”

“I know,” Kim said, answering Will’s expression. “I stand amazed at their work ethic.”

“You can stand us lunch,” Phoebe told him. “Honestly, my feet.”

“And we managed to get some customer addresses out of a few shops, which wasn’t easy but we were dreadfully chic at them and talked about Paris and bought hats to soften them up—”

Phoebe made a noise suggestive of suffering. “Too hideous, darling.”

“And we went to two wrong houses, which was awfully discouraging and rather embarrassing, walking in on people in mourning like that. And then at the third one there was Florrie at the door.”