NICK COULDN’T SETTLE to anything, certainly not the landscape he was trying to finish in Kate’s absence. The mystery of Martin Caldwell’s intentions and the hint of defensiveness in April’s account of their time together in Exeter niggled away at him. Until, by Tuesday morning, he’d decided to do whatever he could to find out more about Caldwell before meeting him.

Tuesday morning was Pilates morning for April. He took a guess on the timing, reckoning he could come up with some kind of cover story if she hadn’t left by the time he arrived or came back while he was still there. But since, as he recalled, she usually adjourned to a coffee shop in Catford Broadway afterwards with some of her classmates, he was confident he’d have the place to himself.

And he was right. As he let himself in after the short drive from Greenwich, he knew at once that the house was empty. And silent. Though, if he let it, the silence would fill with memories of his mother’s voice.

He went up to her bedroom. There were still strands of her hair in a brush, though whether April had left them there deliberately or not he couldn’t have said. He willed himself not to be sucked into thinking about such things.

He’d come for the old hatbox Caro kept at the bottom of her wardrobe, containing not a hat but cards, letters and messages received from friends and relatives during her illness, including daubed paintings of smiling faces from her niece’s four-year-old daughter. It was a poignant collection. And, somewhere in it, Nick felt sure, was the letter Miranda Cushing had sent her a few months before her death.

‘Don’t tell April Miranda’s written to me, Nicky,’ Caro had said to him when he popped round one afternoon and she showed him the letter. ‘She’ll have a fit. She’s always thought she was some kind of traitor to the class struggle for accepting a peerage.’

‘You were pretty down on her yourself,’ Nick had said.

Caro had smiled gently at him. He could picture her smile exactly, and the way the sunlight shafting through the window had fallen across it. ‘Letting politics come between friends seems ever so slightly ridiculous when you look at the world from my current situation.’

‘What does she say in the letter?’

‘Oh, what everyone says. How sorry they are. How much they hope I’ll be better soon. She’s not really a bad person. I haven’t actually met many of those. Still, vellum paper and an embossed letterhead would be too much for April. So, can it be our little secret?’

‘Sure.’