In the Bright Star office Leo and Alice were waiting for him. Now that the immediate shock of Eleanor’s death was over, the staff were excited to be involved in the investigation, eager at the thought that they might be helping. Murder sometimes took young people that way. They had no sense of their own mortality. Alice had set out the notebooks on Eleanor’s desk and had one open at the relevant page. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Nell obviously phoned these people to ask about the history of the girl who died in 1930. She’d tracked down the present owners of the house where Lizzie was supposed to have lived. There’s a phone number and some scribbled notes, which I can’t quite make out. Her handwriting was always indecipherable. But it certainly looks as if she contacted them.’

Perez would have liked to look at the notes on his own, but the young woman had been so helpful that he didn’t have the heart to ask her to leave. Outside in the main office people were pretending to work, but were obviously fascinated too. He sat at Eleanor’s desk and pulled the books towards him.

There was, as Alice had said, a phone number. Then an address: Springfield House, Unst. And two names: Charles Hillier and David Gordon. Then some squiggles that might have been the record of a telephone conversation. It seemed that Eleanor had devised her own form of shorthand and Perez thought it would take time and patience to decipher the code.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very useful.’ He’d never owned a briefcase, but used instead a canvas bag that he’d collected from a stall when the Tall Ships Race had ended in Lerwick one year. He put the notebooks into that. As the young people let him out into the street he paused again. ‘Did Eleanor have a favourite restaurant? Somewhere she might take clients or colleagues for dinner?’

‘There’s a French place in Bloomsbury that was her regular haunt for everyday,’ Leo said. ‘They knew her there and said she was like their daughter. It wasn’t smart enough for clients she wanted to impress, though. Then she’d go flamboyantly upmarket and choose somewhere like the Savoy. Even when she knew the company couldn’t really afford it.’