‘A man came here a few weeks ago,’ she said. ‘He wanted my permission to visit the crypt and look at the bone collection.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I didn’t get his name. I just sent him away. The nerve of the man, he simply appeared without warning, and he didn’t come up to the cottage to knock on the door. I saw him standing over there, on the entertainment area.’

Cooper looked to see where Mrs Chadwick was pointing.

‘Oh, on the patio?’

He heard her sigh deeply. Apparently, a patio ceased to be a patio when it was big enough. Cooper wondered if he should ask Mrs Shelley’s permission to build himself a patio. Then he could invite his friends round for a barbecue next summer. If he still had any friends left by then.

‘Could you describe this man, Mrs Chadwick?’

‘Really, I didn’t take much notice of him.’

‘But surely you must have noticed something. His age, height, build, the colour of his hair? What he was wearing?’

Cooper was surprised to see Madeleine Chadwick looking faintly embarrassed. It was the first suggestion of a crack in her confident demeanour.

‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is that he wasn’t the sort of person I would invite into my home. One often knows these things instinctively, without the need for noticing details. I hope you understand what I mean.’

She seemed to avoid looking at him as she pinched off a dead bloom. After a moment, Cooper felt a blush starting from somewhere deep in his boots. With perfect delicacy, he’d just been told that he, too, was a person Madeleine Chadwick would forget as soon as he’d removed himself from her property.

Then she suddenly seemed to relent. ‘There was one thing …’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘He gave off a strange scent. I didn’t get close to him, of course, but I noticed it after he left. It must have lingered, and I’m so familiar with the scent of my flowers that it was incongruous.’

‘What sort of scent?’

She extended her tongue slightly between her lips, the way some people did when they were thinking. On Madeleine Chadwick, it looked as though she were tasting the air, testing for a scent. For a second, Cooper was reminded of the chameleon in its tank.

‘Not a particularly unpleasant smell, but it didn’t seem quite right on a man of his kind.’

‘Could you describe it?’

‘Oh, you know how a smell fades from your memory once it’s gone. In any case, I couldn’t identify it at the time. I felt as though I ought to, but I couldn’t.’

‘And this man hasn’t bothered you since?’

‘No, thank goodness.’

Cooper took the card from his pocket in its plastic bag. ‘Do these words mean anything to you, Mrs Chadwick?’