‘My ex-husband.’ The emphasis on the last two words made Gillard think that it may not have been grief about the murder of her mother which caused such an uncharacteristic lapse of judgement.

‘Did you argue?’

She gave him a look which spoke weary volumes of domestic disharmony, but said nothing.

Gillard turned to her. ‘Here is some advice. You will be charged. They can’t let you off for exceeding sixty in a built-up area, despite the mitigation of bereavement. You’ve had no previous incidents apart from speeding, so you might be able to retain your licence so long as you show genuine contrition, okay?’

‘Thank you. I will.’

‘So what’s going to happen with the company now?’ He tried to make it sound as casual a piece of small talk as possible.

‘I’ve no idea. My brother never wants to sell. Always a mummy’s boy.’

‘So you would?’

‘Of course. EoS has filled its marketplace, basically. It already produces most of the products that Indian food fans would expect to buy, and is the biggest producer with the largest market share. There is very little growth possible, at least not without overstretching the brand.’

‘So the only way is down,’ he said.

She eyed him. ‘That’s the way I look at it.’

‘Not your mother’s view, I gather.’

‘No. Of course she deserves the lion’s share of the credit for having built it to what it was, but it was pointless to blindly follow my father’s ambitions for the family long after he died. She never needed to sacrifice her life to it.’ She paused, and Gillard could see that she had hit upon a home truth.

‘So who killed her, Prisha?’ He didn’t look in her direction, but his peripheral vision absorbed her reaction to his question. She stared directly ahead, at the traffic, her hands bunched into fists on her lap.

‘Do you know Jason Waddington?’ he asked.

She shifted her entire body so that she was facing him. ‘Don’t try to connect this to me. Did you not listen when I told you this week? It’s Morag.’

‘Why would she want to kill your mother?’

‘It’s quite simple,’ she said, enunciating the words carefully, as if dealing with someone short on intelligence. ‘She has been trying for years to snare my brother in marriage. None of us have been keen on her. So when it became clear that Harry was going to marry Sonali, she had to do something to stop the wedding.’

‘But if Harry preferred Morag, the question of marrying someone else would simply not arise, would it?’ Gillard knew that Prisha already had such a low opinion of his intelligence that he could pretend he knew nothing about the power of arranged marriages. He hoped to provoke her into a greater revelation.

She shook her head in disbelief. ‘You simply haven’t a clue, have you? Harry has the willpower of a jellyfish. From childhood everything has been given to him, all he had to offer in exchange was obedience. First to my late father and then to my mother. But then along came Morag, casting her pale Scottish spells over him, like some witch from the blasted heath. For more than ten years he has been her puppet—’