Henry removed his spectacles and searched his memory. After a moment, his face altered. “Yes,” he said with conviction. “It’s the car that parked me in when I was at Winchester Hospital. I remember very well—it was around the midnight hour, no one else was in the visitors’ car park, and this car had pulled right across my space, hemming me in. It took Melissa and me a full five minutes to get out. I had plenty of time to observe it, so as not to hit the darn thing. Very pretty car—left-hand drive, foreign plates. A Lancia—midnight blue, I think. I remember thinking that some poor tourist must have had their holiday ruined by a medical emergency.”

“It was at the hospital the night Will was in the ITU?” Alex felt a stab of panic, though he tried to conceal it from his father.

Henry nodded; Lucy looked at Alex; Simon at Lucy; and Grace at Henry. The incongruously musical ring of the carriage clock sounded twelve times from next door, in Diana’s tiny study. The temperature in the room dropped. Everyone understood.

SSIÂN WAS AWARE IT MUST NOW BE MIDNIGHT, AS THE News on the Hour intruded on her agitated mood. She picked up the remote and silenced the television. Across the room the telephone answering machine still showed a single steady light, so she had to satisfy herself that she hadn’t dozed off and missed a call. She walked across the large room to her compact kitchen, took a nearly empty bottle of wine from the fridge door, and poured its remaining contents into a glass. She returned to the living room, looking from her open window across the darkened square. Everything was still.

It was too late to try him again, wasn’t it? She’d left things very tense, with a feeling of animosity between her and Calvin, but she’d have liked the comfort—now that forty-eight hours had elapsed—of talking with him. She walked again to the kitchen, pulled down the blind, and cut the lights. Retracing her steps one more time, she reached out for the phone receiver but then hesitated, glancing at her watch. It was barely five minutes after the hour. Yes, it was definitely too late to call—or her pride advised her that it was so. He surely wasn’t out with anyone else? But she’d never give him the satisfaction of knowing she’d wondered.

She slid the switch of the floor lamp across, killing the light, and walked through to her bedroom. She’d prove to herself—and Calvin—that she could still get a good night’s sleep.