‘No!’ she said. ‘I’m sure she hadn’t.’

He wondered again at the uneven relationship between the women. Polly’s attitude felt more like hero-worship than a friendship between equals. But perhaps that was always the way in a relationship – one person was always more dependent than the other.

‘She had moral qualms about sex outside marriage?’

She stared at him. ‘We never discussed it in those terms.’

‘You think such a thing would have been impossible for her?’

‘No,’ Polly said at last. ‘I don’t suppose it would. She didn’t have moral qualms about anything much. But she would have told me about it. We didn’t have secrets. Not about a big thing like that.’

‘When was the last time the two of you met alone?’ Perez wished he’d seen the two women together when Eleanor was alive. He remembered Fran with her friends in London and in the islands. She’d been easy and relaxed with them all. They’d laughed and drunk too much wine and gossiped, and he was struggling to imagine this woman behaving like that. But perhaps Polly was strained because she was grieving, and he thought again that he was being unfair to her.

‘Thursday evening. The day before we left London.’ Polly looked up at him. ‘It was to check last-minute details for the trip. Eleanor met me from the library and we walked back to my flat. I cooked her supper and we talked through the final arrangements.’

‘How was she then?’

‘Fine.’ The answer came too quickly and he waited for her to continue. ‘Really fine. Excited. About work – this documentary that she was making. It was a big deal for her company. A new departure. More popular than the stuff she’d made before, and if everything worked out it would be shown on BBC1. She was fizzing. More excited than I’d seen her for years. I thought that she’d finally moved on after losing the baby.’

‘But she didn’t talk about a new man in her life?’

Polly shook her head. ‘I don’t know where that idea has come from. Have you been talking to Cilla? She never thought that Eleanor’s marriage would last. She’s an intellectual snob and Ian was never good enough.’

‘Cilla is Eleanor’s mother?’

‘Yes, she’s an art historian. She works for the British Museum. Very grand. A character.’ She paused and Perez wondered if Cilla had considered that Polly wasn’t quite good enough for her daughter too.

Later they were eating lunch in the kitchen of Springfield House. James Grieve had been fretting all morning about missing his flight and had already left. Sandy had gone with him to collect Vicki Hewitt, the CSI, so again it was just Perez and Willow Reeves sitting across a table, sharing food. Perez felt comfortable working with her, but ambiguous about the effect she had on him. Another woman in his life, even if she were a colleague, felt like a kind of betrayal to Fran. And Willow was tall and big-boned with tangled hair and scruffy clothes. Her parents were hippies living in a commune in North Uist. He’d never met anyone quite like her before.