‘Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. And it was a bit late, then, for Yvette to start screaming and clawing at Alec, and passing out cold on the floor. If she’d had an iota of control, the boy wouldn’t have set out expressly to defy her. I was there,’ said Landry, stonily. ‘On a weekend visit. Easter Sunday. I had been for a walk down to the village, and I came back to find them all looking for him. I headed straight for the quarry. I knew, you see. It was the place he’d been forbidden to go – so there he was.’

‘You found the body, did you?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘That must have been highly distressing.’

‘Yes,’ said Landry, his lips barely moving. ‘It was.’

‘And it was after Charlie died, wasn’t it, that your sister and Sir Alec adopted Lula?’

‘Which was probably the single most stupid thing Alec Bristow ever agreed to,’ said Landry. ‘Yvette had already proven herself a disastrous mother; was she likely to be any more successful while in a state of abandoned grief? Of course, she’d always wanted a daughter, a baby to dress in pink, and Alec thought it would make her happy. He always gave Yvette anything she wanted. He was besotted with her from the moment she joined his typing pool, and he was an unvarnished East Ender. Yvette has always had a predilection for a bit of rough.’

Strike wondered what the real source of Landry’s anger could be.

‘You don’t get along with your sister, Mr Landry?’ asked Strike.

‘We get along perfectly well; it is simply that I am not blind to what Yvette is, Mr Strike, nor how much of her misfortune is her own damn fault.’

‘Was it difficult for them to get approved for another adoption after Charlie died?’ asked Strike.

‘I dare say it would have been, if Alec hadn’t been a multimillionaire,’ snorted Landry. ‘I know the authorities were concerned about Yvette’s mental health, and they were both a bit long in the tooth by then. It’s a great pity that they weren’t turned down. But Alec was a man of infinite resourcefulness and he had all sorts of strange contacts from his barrow-boy days. I don’t know the details, but I’d be prepared to bet money changed hands somewhere. Even so, he couldn’t manage a Caucasian. He brought another child of completely unknown provenance into the family, to be raised by a depressed and hysterical woman of no judgement. It was hardly a surprise to me that the result was catastrophic. Lula was as unstable as John and as wild as Charlie, and Yvette had just as little idea how to manage her.’