Urged by everyone to take a break, she decided to go to Paris after finding Sylvan’s phone number through the Internet. They would stroll the boulevards together and love would blossom. But when she phoned him, he sounded distant and then she heard a young female voice call out in English, ‘Come back to bed, darling.’

Blushing, and furious with herself, Agatha found her old obsession with James Lacey surfacing again. It was like some disease, gone for long stretches, but always recurring.

Agatha remembered that James had accused her of never having listened to him. He worked as a travel writer but had said that he planned to write a series of guidebooks to famous battlefields. Dreaming of surprising him with her knowledge of his subject, Agatha decided to visit the site of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea and so take that holiday everyone was telling her she needed badly.

She would go first to Istanbul and take it from there. She had stayed in Istanbul before, at the Pera Palace Hotel, made famous by Agatha Christie in her book Murder on the Orient Express, but settled on booking a room at a hotel on the other side of the Golden Horn in the Sultan Ahmet district, under the shadow of the Blue Mosque.

The Artifes Hotel was comfortable and the staff were friendly. Agatha, although tired after the flight, felt restless. She peered in the mirror and saw the ravages of her competitiveness clearly for the first time. She had lost weight and there were dark shadows under her eyes.

She left her suitcase unopened and wandered out of the hotel. There was an interesting café close by, the Marmara Café. She peered in. The walls were lined with carpets. At the end of the long café was a vine-covered terrace.

But the tables on the terrace seemed full. Agatha hesitated.

A man rose to his feet and said in English, ‘I’ll be leaving shortly.’

Agatha sat down opposite him with a sigh of relief. She saw to her delight that there was an ashtray on the table and pulled out her cigarettes.

‘Are you English?’ she asked her new companion.

‘No, I am Turkish-Cypriot. My name is Erol Fehim.’

Agatha assessed him. He was a small neat man wearing a good jacket. He had glasses and grey hair. He exuded an air of innocence and kindness. Agatha was immediately reminded of her friend, the vicar’s wife, Mrs Bloxby.

She introduced herself in turn and then ordered an apple tea.

‘What brings you to Istanbul?’ asked Erol.

Agatha explained she was stopping off at the Artifes Hotel until she worked out a way to get to Balaclava in the Crimea. ‘I’m staying at the same hotel,’ said Erol. ‘We could ask there.’

Lonely Agatha warmed to the sound of that ‘we’.