‘I could not have,’ said Terence – and for a moment he flared again in anger, ‘even if I had wanted to. I just wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, and drink and drink and drink. I had just seen my wife after more than thirty years,’ he saw again the empty, sunny street outside the Academy, ‘and then lost her again.’ For a moment he didn’t speak. There was not a sound in the court, not a cough, not a rustle.

Mr Tweed had to take Terence where he was leading him.

‘Mr Blue, this has been a difficult day for you I know but I would like to ask you one more question. Newspaper reports show that your first wife was the TV actress Betty Bailey to whom you were married for six months when you were already forty but I don’t think this is the woman we are talking about. I believe you were actually first married when you were twenty-four.’

‘Yes,’ said Terence dully.

‘What was her name?’

‘Mary Shand,’ he said woodenly, the name used at the mental hospital, pain back in his heart.

Elvira leant forward suddenly, and her bag dropped on the wooden floor beside her. The echoing bang after the silence in the court made Terence jump slightly and he looked back over his shoulder for a second, up to the public gallery where the noise had come from.

Then he shook himself.

‘She is also known, my first wife, as Nicola Abbott,’ he said. ‘She was – an actress.’

‘Who – attacked you in Brighton recently?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you go then after all, Mr Blue, to find her?’

‘I – thought she needed me.’

‘So you had ignored the psychiatrists’ instructions to you?’

‘I couldn’t help it. Yes,’ said Terence Blue. ‘But I had a feeling that maybe she needed me after all, that maybe all the doctors were wrong after all. That maybe she had come to the reunion because she – did want to see me, after all, that the doctors had got everything wrong.’ And he looked down at the floor of the witness stand. I can never tell them how it was when we were young. And then he said what he had planned to say.

‘I frightened her,’ he said. ‘It was my fault. She stabbed me because I frightened her.’

The silence in the court was absolute.

Finally Mr Tweed said very gently, ‘Mr Blue what happened in Simone Taylor’s room in the Dorchester the night of that reunion?’

And Terence made an odd, disjointed gesture with his good hand, across his eyes, as if he needed to do that to bring his mind back to the present. He sighed very slightly before he answered.