She closed her eyes for a moment, as though to concentrate better on some internal pain. He wondered how heavily medicated she was. Beneath the gracious manner, he divined the faintest whiff of something bitter in her words, much as the lime blossom failed to cover the smell of decay, and he wondered at it, considering that Bristow spent most of his time dancing attendance on her.

‘Why isn’t John here?’ asked Lady Bristow again, with her eyes still shut.

‘He’s been held up at the office,’ repeated Strike.

‘Oh, yes. Yes, you said.’

‘Lady Bristow, I’d like to ask you a few questions, and I apologise in advance if they seem over-personal, or distressing.’

‘When you have been through what I have,’ she said quietly, ‘nothing much can hurt you any more. Do call me Yvette.’

‘Thank you. Do you mind if I take notes?’

‘No, not at all,’ she said, and she watched him take out his pen and notebook with a dim show of interest.

‘I’d like to start, if you don’t mind, with how Lula came into your family. Did you know anything about her background when you adopted her?’

She looked the very picture of helplessness and passivity lying there with her limp arms on the covers.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know anything. Alec might have known, but if he did, he never told me.’

‘What makes you think your husband knew something?’

‘Alec always went into things as deeply as he could,’ she said, with a faint, reminiscent smile. ‘He was a very successful businessman, you know.’

‘But he never told you anything about Lula’s first family?’

‘Oh no, he wouldn’t have done that.’ She seemed to find this a strange suggestion. ‘I wanted her to be mine, just mine, you see. Alec would have wanted to protect me, if he knew anything. I could not have borne the idea that somebody out there might come and claim her one day. I had already lost Charlie, and I wanted a daughter so badly; the idea of losing her, too…’

The nurse returned bearing a tray with two cups on it and a plate of chocolate bourbons.

‘One coffee,’ she said cheerfully, placing it beside Strike on the nearer of the bedside tables, ‘and one camomile tea.’

She bustled out again. Lady Bristow closed her eyes. Strike took a gulp of black coffee and said:

‘Lula went looking for her biological parents in the year before she died, didn’t she?’

‘That’s right,’ said Lady Bristow, with her eyes still closed. ‘I had just been diagnosed with cancer.’

There was a pause, in which Strike put down his coffee cup with a soft chink, and the distant cheers of the small children in the square outside floated through the open window.