He frowned, trying to remember. ‘Bit of a party animal, good looking, quite posh. I only met her a couple of times though; me and Luke were at different unis.’

She picked up a card from the pile. ‘Why did they split?’

‘As I recall, she finished with him. He was quite cut up about it.’ He thought for a while, brow furrowed. ‘Actually, there was something odd about their break-up, now you mention it. I remember him calling me upset that Jade had ended it out of the blue. Said she’d accused him of something that wasn’t true.’

‘Accused him? Of what?’

‘That’s just it, he wouldn’t say. He was really down for a while. I saw him in the holidays and he wasn’t his old self at all.’ He picked up a card then shrugged. ‘The next time we spoke, he was over it.’ He gave a half-smile. ‘You know Luke, not one to dwell on things too long.’

Jade Williams – now Spencer – lived in a smart Georgian townhouse in Lambeth. Pinning her down to a time she could meet had proven tricky, and when at last a day was agreed, Mac had to work, so Clara went alone. She stood on the front step after she’d rung the doorbell, taking in the freshly painted olive green door, the pots of well-tended geraniums and the antique glass lantern that hung above her head. It was a quiet, leafy street with expensive cars parked outside each carefully renovated house.

The woman who answered was tall, attractive and blond, immaculately dressed in a chic trouser suit that made Clara instantly conscious of her own jeans and trainers. From behind her a red setter came bounding on to the step, wagging its tail and enthusiastically sticking its nose into Clara’s crotch. ‘Clara? How nice to meet you,’ Jade’s smile was sincere but distracted as she ushered her inside.

She led Clara down to an enormous basement with an open-plan kitchen, tasteful and expensive looking with duck-egg blue units and white marble worktops. Clara perched at the rectory table and watched as Jade flew around making tea, talking in rapid, breathless flurries as she told Clara about the interiors company she’d started with her husband – ‘Honestly we’ve been working like dogs, our poor baby barely recognizes us, though luckily we’ve got the most wonderful nanny’ – and the alterations they’d had done to the house – ‘That’s the thing about buying around here, anywhere bigger than a shoebox and you have to expect to completely gut the place …’

Clara tried to imagine what she would have been like when she was younger and dating Luke. It was a strange idea. Had she always been so intimidatingly self-assured? She couldn’t quite picture them together.