‘I made the cake as a way of saying thank you, to you,’ she said to Gillard, her voice choked.

Gillard rested a restraining hand on Hoskins arm. ‘I am grateful, and we are sorry to upset you with this news,’ Gillard said. ‘But there is another element here which we feel needs explaining.’

‘What element?’

‘Do you know Deepak Tripathi?’

Kirsty looked down at her hands and said nothing.

Gillard repeated the question, and as she looked up at him he could see tears in her eyes. She nodded. ‘Yes, I know him.’

‘How?’

‘I’m not allowed to tell you. I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement.’

‘You are going to bloody tell us,’ Hoskins said. ‘Now start talking!’

‘I used to be Deepak Tripathi’s PA at a property company in the City of London. I worked for him and all the other non-executive directors. I was only nineteen, and had just qualified from a secretarial course. He’s very charming and handsome, but of course I didn’t know then what a slippery character he was.’

‘Did you know he was also a director of Empire of Spice?’ Gillard asked.

‘Not at the time. I didn’t even know what a non-executive director was, and how they do sometimes just one day a week for a variety of different companies. I assumed that I only saw him occasionally because he worked in a different location. I didn’t know about the other jobs.’

‘So how come you ended up being trussed up in a non-disclosure agreement?’ Hoskins asked.

‘I’m sure you can guess. He invited me out to lunch, then out to dinner another time, told me he was divorced and unhappy, then invited me to dinner at some posh London hotel where he also had a room. In the morning—’

‘So to be clear, you did have sex with him?’ Hoskins asked, with what to Gillard seemed like predictable and voyeuristic eagerness.

‘What do you think?’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I rather fell for him, foolish me. I thought we were going out together and he was just very busy. He lavished money on me, something that had never happened to me before. But then of course a few months later I discovered I was just one on a fairly large roster of available women. I confronted him about it, and cried at the office, and told one of the older secretaries. He got me sacked, somehow, some trumped-up nonsense about mixed up letters. The company paid me off, on condition that I sign a non-disclosure contract.’

‘How much money?’ Hoskins asked.

‘It seemed like quite a lot at the time, £10,000, but I realised afterwards that I probably could have got a lot more. There was also the guarantee of sparkling references. I got the impression from the HR woman that I wasn’t the first.’ She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘There, I’ve spilled the beans, haven’t I? If he ever finds out about it, I have to repay the cash with interest of 25 per cent a year, and cover all his legal fees. It would bankrupt me, and he knows it.’