‘So there is still an interest in crime, here on Dearth?’ I said.

‘Very much so, but these days crime goes by another name.’

I waited for her to say more about that, but it was the end of a long day and I was tired of the whole thing. I did not press her. When she continued to tell me about herself I was content to let her.

She told me she was a widow – her husband had died nine years earlier. She said she read thrillers and mysteries for recreation, but not just those, she added. She described some biographies she had read recently. They were of Dearth notables, but I had not heard of them. I guessed she was about fifteen years older than me. She took her drink in small sips, but at frequent intervals. We ordered another round. I was impressed by her: she had a calm, steady manner that made her seem in control, but this was sometimes belied by the way she spoke. Much of what she said, at least in those first few minutes, was questioning, enquiring. I felt she was used to asking questions.

She asked me about my work. I was always guarded about this when meeting someone, but I told her a little, where I worked, when and for how long in a day, what I was writing at the moment. I told her something about Jo, the many years we had shared together, the contentment of a long relationship. I described where we lived: it was a large single-storey house on one of the coast roads to the north of Raba City. It was on the edge of one of the largest nature parks on Raba, a vast area of undeveloped tropical forest that spread across most of the width of that part of the island.

We ordered more drinks – she switched to the Salay wine, which she said she had not tried before. The logs in the stove settled, sparks flew, a feeling of relaxed ease came over me. I cannot remember everything we talked about then. It was just an agreeable conversation between two people who had recently met. I remember asking Frejah Harsent about her present life, but all she would say was that she was semi-retired, past the official age of retirement. There was a project she was working on that she wanted to see through to a conclusion. Something about a colleague. The seigniory was keeping her on until then. She gave no details.

The conversation drifted back to crime fiction. She wanted to know where ideas came from, how they could be constructed into a story. This is the question many writers are not only frequently asked, but often ask themselves. There is no easy or satisfactory answer. Certainly, in my own experience, working with ideas is a largely instinctive process, one you hardly recognize until afterwards. That isn’t what most people expect as an answer.