The two police officers – the tall, scruffy woman and the dark, still man – were waiting for her in a sunny room at the front of the house. They offered her coffee from a Thermos jug and home-made biscuits. It felt a bit like the interview she’d had for the job at the Sentiman Library, although then the people asking the questions had been elderly trustees, eccentric and wanting her to do well.

‘Sorry to take you through all these details again.’

Polly hadn’t caught the woman’s name when they’d first been introduced and felt too embarrassed to ask now. She loved her work in the library because there she avoided the small humiliations that had seemed to make up her life before she was appointed to the post. She wondered how other people faced them. Marcus was so confident that he sailed through life convinced that everybody loved him. Now she smiled and said that it was perfectly fine and she realized why they had to ask.

‘You and Eleanor have been friends for a long time,’ the detective said.

‘Since our first day at college. I’m not quite sure how we got on so well. We were very different. I was so scared – the first one of my family ever to have gone to university. And she took it all in her stride, a star in the University Dramatic Society from the first audition, universally popular. I’m not sure how I would have survived that first year without Eleanor and Caroline.’

‘She confided in you?’

Polly thought about that. ‘Certainly she used to. Boys and affairs, and worries about work. I was never any competition, you see. Once she married Ian, of course we didn’t see quite as much of each other.’

‘And she had him to confide in then.’ The detective smiled. It hadn’t been quite a question, but still Polly felt compelled to answer.

‘Yes, I suppose she did.’

‘Or perhaps you don’t think Ian was as sympathetic about Eleanor’s problems as you would have been?’ The female detective smiled again. And waited.

Polly felt herself blushing. ‘A miscarriage is sometimes difficult for a man to understand,’ she said. ‘Eleanor had a horrible experience, especially the second time.’

‘And she talked to you about it?’

‘I went round to her house as soon as I heard.’ Polly remembered the evening. It had been raining. The sort of monsoon rain that got her drenched as soon as she left the car, and bounced off the pavements and spilled over the gutters. Ian had opened the door to her and at first she’d thought he wouldn’t let her in, that he’d keep her waiting, soaking, on the doorstep, but he’d stood aside eventually. Eleanor had been in her dressing gown on the sofa. No make-up and looking old, so in the first instant Polly had thought that Cilla, Eleanor’s mother, had been sitting there. She looked up and Polly saw that she’d been crying.

‘Oh, Pol, it was horrible. I had to give birth to it. The pain of labour and nothing to show at the end.’