We walked past her and climbed back up to street level.

‘Frost and Longhurst,’ Hawthorne said.

‘The accountants …’ I muttered.

‘The name doesn’t mean anything to you?’

‘No. Should it?’

‘It’s lucky you’re not a detective.’ Hawthorne glanced at his watch. ‘Time for one more visit. If you’re up for it.’

‘Don’t you ever eat, Hawthorne?’

‘Ewan Lloyd is expecting us.’

Ewan Lloyd would complete the line-up, and perhaps he would shed some light on what had happened. For myself, I had no idea who had killed Harriet Throsby. It was always possible that her husband had finally got tired of being criticised day in, day out. It would have been easy enough to slip out of school, cycle home and kill his wife. Her daughter had made no secret that she loathed her mother and she didn’t work too far from home either. Jordan Williams, Tirian Kirke, Sky Palmer, Ahmet Yurdakul, Maureen Bates and Ewan Lloyd were the six main suspects, all connected to her by the play. Any one of them could have got hold of my dagger and planted it in her chest.

It had to be one of them.

But which?

14

Premonitions

Ewan Lloyd’s home was a mews house in every respect but one. It wasn’t actually in a mews. It was compact and elegant, painted pale blue, with a flat roof and a front room that had been converted from a garage. It was wedged in between two very similar houses in a cobbled street with old-fashioned street lamps. But the street itself led somewhere. I could imagine it being used as a rat run by north London mothers taking their children to school. Finsbury Park tube station, one of the most depressing stations on the London Underground system, was just round the corner. It had been my nearest station when I was living in Crouch End and I might have rubbed shoulders with Ewan any number of times. It’s amazing, really, the invisible process that can turn complete strangers into friends.

As Hawthorne rang the front bell, yellow light spilling out of the front windows and the sound of a Chopin nocturne being played on a speaker system, it struck me that this was exactly the sort of home I would have expected Ewan to live in. It reflected his single-mindedness, the way he presented himself, as if the light and the music had been arranged specially for our arrival. It was also the house of a divorced man. Ahmet had told me that he’d been married with four children and it was impossible to imagine them all living here. I wondered if he was still on his own.

The nocturne stopped mid-trill and a few moments later, Ewan opened the door and stood there, blinking through his round-framed spectacles. Hawthorne had told him we were on our way and he had dressed for the occasion in a velvet jacket with another long scarf dangling from his shoulders. At the same time, he wasn’t happy to see us. He filled the entire door frame … but then again, it was a small door.