Frank shook his head. “Only by way of what Gerald told me, and that not much. Except it was evident he was obsessed with her.”

“Enough to leave his wife?”

“Oh, yes. But I don’t think he would have. He wouldn’t have thought he’d have to.”

Jury raised his eyebrows in question.

“Gerald thought he could keep everything going at once.” Here he made a gesture of tossing, each hand going up and down, as if throwing plates in the air. He smiled. “The kind of man who was not about to give up something he didn’t absolutely have to. Not women, not money.”

“But he had both.”

Frank Flood smiled. “As I said.”

On that ambiguous note, Jury left.

23

But had Frank Flood told that to the Devon-Cornwall constabulary?

“No,” Frank had said, “it honestly didn’t occur to me.”

Jury reflected on this possible affair as he drove toward Belgravia and the Summerston house.

What had Manon Vinet been doing in the UK and on Bryher?

It was a variation of this question he asked Lady Summerston after Crick had ushered her into the too-elaborately done drawing room—too much silk and sheer stuff at high windows, too much flounce and flourish on low ottomans and pillows, too much of everything except when it came to Lady Summerston herself, who kept to fine linen and lightweight wool. She was underdone and elegant.

Wearing a spruce-green linen suit, Lady Summerston was handing out cups of tea and talking about her late husband. Had been for the last ten minutes over their first cups, talking about his everlasting consideration for the men under him in Korea, and his heroic action in the saving of them (“You know, of course, about his Conspicuous Gallantry award”); and about his helping two of the servants’ children into Oxbridge, one for each school; and about his establishing a foundling hospital in North London.

That was news to Jury. “Foundling hospital?”

“A little place he bought and funded for infants and small children who had been abandoned or were otherwise alone. Gerald was extraordinarily kind,” she said. “It’s called the Summerston Foundling Hospital. In Bayswater. We read this op-ed piece in the Times several years before he died about these abandoned children Social Services found in a house in North London, alone, their parents seeming to have walked out and left them. It was truly pathetic, the state of these children.” She paused and put her hand to her head as if thinking about these children’s misery, and then went on. “Gerald staffed it with very capable people: two doctors, several nurses, matron and so forth. He went to great lengths. He was really the soul of kindness. It’s still there, still operating; a cousin of his took it over.”

“Bayswater?”

“Yes. It’s on Bayswater Road.”