I have more than enough time to ruminate on the slow train back to London. Lambing can’t have been long past and the fields are filled with gambolling young ones, unaware of the massacre to come.

I have a good idea who Kendall was sleeping with. But who was the father of Clare’s baby? I was so convinced it was Kendall I am now out of ideas. How on earth to find out? Charles doesn’t have a clue. I don’t know any of Clare’s friends well, certainly not well enough to phone them out of the blue and ask a question like that. Plus, if Clare was having an affair, she would have done it the way she did everything else: methodically and with discretion.

Do I really want to go around London asking all and sundry who my sister was shagging? London is a village: word gets out.

I haven’t been thinking clearly. Clare was pregnant by someone other than her husband. Clare was killed. It’s natural to leap to the conclusion that one caused the other. But that’s correlation, not cause and effect. All I have is Charles’s assertion, given moments after he found out about the pregnancy, that it wasn’t his. Thinking about the state he was in when I spoke to him on the phone, is it plausible that he got his dates wrong, or forgot a night they’d had together, or was simply in denial that he’d lost a child as well as his wife? It’s all possible. And I was dumb not to see that. Clare wasn’t killed because of the baby. Far more likely that she was killed for something she knew. There might have been any number of secrets she kept that would be a motive for silencing her. And one of those lethal secrets would be the identity of the man Kendall was shagging.

*

Jess and I say our goodbyes on the concourse at Paddington.

‘With luck, Kendall will be too much the repressed Englishman to make much of a fuss,’ she says. But I can tell she is unconvinced. ‘He can’t really complain without repeating what you said and he has too much to hide to want to open that can of worms, I reckon.’

‘I think I’ve got the story,’ I tell her. ‘The identity of his lover. And I can prove it.’

Her face clouds. ‘Please give it up, Gil. It’s not worth it. You’re in danger of doing yourself irreparable damage. Get a bit of rest. Please.’

‘Don’t you want to know who it is?’

She shrugs. ‘Probably better if I don’t.’

*

As soon as I’m in a black cab, I call Wilkinson.

‘I need to see the photos again.’

‘OK.’ He’s non-committal, on his guard. ‘Explain.’