At half past ten on that Saturday morning, Commander Adam Dalgliesh and Emma Lavenham had an appointment to meet her father. To meet a future father-in-law for the first time, especially with the purpose of informing him that one is shortly to marry his daughter, is seldom an enterprise undertaken without some misgivings. Dalgliesh, with a vague recollection of similar fictional encounters, had somehow envisaged that, as the suppliant, he was expected to see Professor Lavenham on his own, but was easily persuaded by Emma that they should visit her father together. “Otherwise, darling, he’ll keep asking what my views are. After all, he’s never yet seen you and I’ve hardly mentioned your name. If I’m not there I won’t be sure he’s taken it in. He does have a tendency to vagueness, although I’m never sure how much of that is genuine.”

“Are his vague moods frequent?”

“They are when I’m with him, but there’s nothing wrong with his brain. He does rather like to tease.”

Dalgliesh thought that vagueness and teasing would be the least of his problems with his prospective father-in-law. He had noticed that men of distinction in old age were given to exaggerating the eccentricities of youth and the middle years, as if these self-defining quirks of personality were a defence against the draining away of physical and mental powers, the amorphous flattening of the self in its last years. He was uncertain what Emma and her father felt for each other, but surely there must have been love—in memory at least—and affection. Emma had told him that her younger sister, playful, biddable and prettier than she and killed in childhood by a speeding car, had been his favourite child, but she had spoken without a note of criticism or resentment. Resentment was not an emotion he associated with Emma. But however difficult the relationship, she would want this meeting between father and lover to be a success. It was his job to ensure that it was, that it didn’t remain an embarrassment or a lasting disquietude in her memory.