“I had a letter yesterday. He seems to be settling down well in Africa. It’s probably the best place for him. He couldn’t hope to recover from Candace’s suicide while working here. If she wanted to separate us, she certainly went about it the right way.”

But he spoke without rancour, almost without interest. After the inquest they had rarely talked about Candace’s suicide, and always with unease. Why, she wondered, had he chosen this moment, this walk together, to revisit the painful past? Was it his way of making some kind of formal closure, of saying that it was now time for the talking and speculation to stop?

“And Flavia? Is she, like Sharon, out of your mind?”

“No, we’ve been in touch. She’s getting married.”

“So soon?”

“Someone she contacted on the Internet. She writes that he’s a solicitor, widowed two years ago, with a daughter aged three. About forty, lonely, looking for a wife who loves children. She says she’s very happy. At least she’s getting what she wanted. It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.”

They had left the avenue now and were re-entering the west door. Glancing at her, he caught her secret smile.

She said, “Yes, she was very wise. That’s how I’ve always acted myself.”

Chapter 2

2

Helena had broken the news to Lettie in the library. She said, “You disapprove, don’t you?”

“I have no right to disapprove, only the right to be fearful for you. You don’t love him.”

“Perhaps not now, not yet totally, but it will come. All marriages are a process of falling in or out of love. Don’t worry, we shall suit each other very well in bed and out, and this marriage will last.”

“And the Cressett flag will be raised again over the Manor, and in time a child of yours will choose to live here.”

“Dear Lettie, how well you understand me.”

And now Lettie was alone, thinking over the offer that Helena had made to her before they parted, pacing through the gardens but seeing nothing, and now at last, as so often happened, walking slowly down the lime walk to the stones. As she looked back at the windows of the west wing, her mind turned to that private patient whose murder had changed the lives of all who, innocent or guilty, had been touched by it. But wasn’t that what violence always did? Whatever that scar had meant to Rhoda Gradwyn—an expiation, her personal noli me tangere, defiance, a memento—she had, for some reason which no one at the Manor knew or would ever know, found the will to get rid of it and change the course of her life. She had been robbed of that hope; it was the lives of others that would be irrevocably changed.