His own appearance was, he felt, as misleading as Beverley’s. His father was English, his mother Indian, and he had inherited her beauty but none of the deep attachment to her country which she had never lost and which her husband shared. They had married when she was eighteen and he twelve years older. They had been passionately in love and remained in love, and their annual visits to India were the highlight of their year. Throughout boyhood Francis had accompanied them, but always with a sense of being an alien, ill at ease, unable to participate in a world to which his father, who seemed happier, more light-hearted, in India than in England, readily adapted himself in speech, dress and food. He had felt, too, from early childhood that his parents’ love was too all-consuming to admit of a third person, even an only child. He knew he was loved, but in the company of his father, a retired headmaster, had always felt more like a promising and valued sixth-former than a son. Their benign non-interference was disconcerting. When he was sixteen, listening to the complaints of a school friend about his parents—the ridiculous rule about coming home before midnight, the warnings about drugs, heavy drinking, AIDS, their insistence that homework should take precedence over pleasure, niggling complaints about hairstyle, clothes and the state of his room, which, after all, was supposed to be private—had made Francis feel that his parents’ tolerance amounted to an uninterest which was close to emotional neglect. This was not what parenting was supposed to be.

His father’s response to his choice of career had been one that he suspected had been used before. “There are only two important things about one’s choice of job: that it should promote the happiness and well-being of others and give satisfaction to you. The police service fulfils the first and I hope that it will fulfil the second.” He had almost had to stop himself from saying, “Thank you, sir.” But he knew that he loved his parents and was sometimes quietly aware that the distancing was not all on their side and that he saw them too seldom. This lunch was to be some small atonement for neglect.

The call came on his dedicated mobile at ten-fifty-five, while he was adding to his selection of organic vegetables, and was Kate’s voice. “We have a case. The apparent murder of a patient at a private clinic in Stoke Cheverell, in Dorset. It’s in a manor house.”

“That makes a change, ma’am. But why the Squad? Why not Dorset Constabulary?”