For a moment David didn’t answer. Willow even wondered if he’d heard. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘And Charles was something of a philistine when it came to art. Leaze’s stuff wasn’t really his sort of thing.’

‘But he might have met her in a different context?’ Perez moved to the table and sat between them. His elbows were on the table and his hands cupped his face. He didn’t look at David, but had obviously picked up some uncertainty in his response.

There was another moment of silence. Willow saw Sandy’s car drive into the courtyard. She hoped he wouldn’t come barging in. She sensed that this conversation between Gordon and Perez was important. ‘Charlie was a good actor,’ David said, ‘but I knew him very well.’

‘And you thought he might be pretending that he’d never heard of Monica Leaze?’ Perez tipped his head slightly to the side to put the question.

‘Not exactly that, but I’m not convinced that our calling into the gallery was entirely by chance. I wanted to come straight back. We’d had a long day and had bags of shopping in the boot. Charlie was insistent. “Let’s give ourselves a bit of a treat. A real tea.” He knew I’d never deny him anything that he really wanted. And then he looked at the paintings. I could tell immediately that they weren’t his style, but he looked at them very carefully. Usually he would have been bored. He had a butterfly mind, in turn passionate and dismissive. But he took a sort of proprietary interest in them. As if they’d been painted by a protégée. Or someone that he knew.’

‘Did you ask him if he knew Monica? If he’d met her perhaps in London?’ Now Perez sounded like an elderly teacher, precise but encouraging. Willow wondered how he did it, how he seemed to know exactly what approach would work with a witness. He’d told her once, in a moment of weakness at the end of a case, that his ex-wife had called him ‘emotionally incontinent’ – too empathetic for his own good. Perhaps that was his secret.

Another silence. Sandy looked in through the window and Willow shook her head slightly. He walked away and round to the front of the house. At last David answered. ‘I didn’t ask him. I think we’d become so used to deceiving ourselves, about the business and our life here, that we’d stopped talking about anything important at all. And I was so afraid of prying, you see. We have a right to our own secrets, don’t you think – our own privacy – even in a relationship? I thought if he wanted me to know what scheme he might be dreaming up, then he would tell me.’