‘The police did everything they could to discredit me,’ said Tansy, disregarding Bristow and addressing Strike. ‘They got there too late, and he’d already gone, so of course they covered it up. No one who hasn’t been through what I went through with the press can understand what it was like. It was absolute bloody hell. I went into the clinic just to get away from it all. I can’t believe it’s legal, what the press are allowed to do in this country; and all for telling the truth, that’s the bloody joke. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t I? I would have, if I’d known what was coming.’

She twisted her loose diamond ring around her finger.

‘Freddie was asleep in bed when Lula fell, wasn’t he?’ Strike asked Tansy.

‘Yah, that’s right,’ she said.

Her hand slid up to her face and she smoothed nonexistent strands of hair off her forehead. The waiter returned with menus again, and Strike was forced to hold back his questions until they had ordered. He was the only one to ask for pudding; all the rest had coffee.

‘When did Freddie get out of bed?’ he asked Tansy, when the waiter had left.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You say he was in bed when Lula fell; when did he get up?’

‘When he heard me screaming,’ she said, as though this was obvious. ‘I woke him up, didn’t I?’

‘He must have moved quickly.’

‘Why?’

‘You said: “I ran out of the flat, past Freddie, and downstairs.” So he was already in the room before you ran out to tell Derrick what had happened?’

A missed beat.

‘That’s right,’ she said, smoothing her immaculate hair again, shielding her face.

‘So he went from fast asleep in bed, to awake and in the sitting room, within seconds? Because you started screaming and running pretty much instantaneously, from what you said?’

Another infinitesimal pause.

‘Yah,’ she said. ‘Well – I don’t know. I think I screamed – I screamed while I was frozen on the spot – for a moment, maybe – I was just so shocked – and Freddie came running out of the bedroom, and then I ran past him.’

‘Did you stop to tell him what you’d seen?’

‘I can’t remember.’

Bristow looked as though he was about to stage one of his untimely interventions again. Strike held up a hand to forestall him; but Tansy plunged off on another tack, eager, he guessed, to leave the subject of her husband.