‘Did Eleanor keep in touch with her father? Had they met lately?’ Perez wondered if this might have been the man in the restaurant seen by Caroline Lawson.

‘I doubt it. Oriental art is his subject and he travels a lot. He’s seldom in London and he has a new young family of his own. By his third wife.’ The last phrase was spat out like venom.

‘But you never discouraged contact?’

Cilla shrugged. ‘If I had, Eleanor would have taken no notice. As I’ve told you, she was headstrong. I think she had Richard’s email address and they might have met occasionally when he was in town, but she never discussed him with me.’

‘What did you make of her marriage?’

‘Ian Longstaff wasn’t the sort of man I would have expected her to marry, but he seemed to make her happy. She claimed that he did.’ Cilla Montgomery smoothed her skirt. ‘Of course he couldn’t give her children, and that was a disappointment.’

Perez wondered how a man could be held responsible for a miscarriage in late pregnancy, but didn’t respond. Cilla continued, ‘I thought she made too much of it. These things happen, and men expect women to get on with it. A child isn’t everything.’

‘There was some tension within the marriage?’

‘She never said that.’

‘But you felt it?’

Another silence. Somewhere in the distance a car alarm had been triggered. The wailing drilled into Perez’s brain and then stopped as suddenly as it had started.

‘Not tension exactly. She could have lived with tension. Eleanor enjoyed excitement and challenge. Like me she was most scared of being bored. Even the drama of the miscarriages had its element of satisfaction for her, guaranteeing that she would be the centre of attention at least for a while.’ Cilla turned briefly to look out of the window to the courtyard beyond. ‘Ian began as a challenge. His background and skills were very different from my daughter’s. She found his solidness and his working-class family interesting, almost exotic. And he stood up to her in arguments. But, as time went on, he loved her too much and gave into her too easily. Not his fault. How can you fight with a woman who has just lost a baby? I think she began to despise him just for those qualities that another person might admire: gentleness, compassion, loyalty.’ She paused again and gave a strange little laugh that jarred on Perez’s nerves in the way that the car alarm had done. ‘I’m not painting a very flattering picture of my daughter, am I, Inspector? But I understood her because she was so much like me.’