I started. I had been so engrossed that I hadn’t noticed Beth arrive. I felt as if I’d been caught with my hands in the till. Perhaps, in some way, I had. “Checking some stuff out,” I said.

“You want some coffee?”

“Great.”

While Beth was gone I wondered if what I was doing was wrong. Well, of course it was. The question was how wrong, and whether it mattered. Frances was my employer and she probably thought of me as a friend. Here I was, under false pretenses, snooping through her office, rifling through her dead friend’s personal life, behaving like a spy. When Beth returned, she gave me the coffee but she didn’t head off, as she normally did, to potter around and talk on the phone. Instead she pulled up a chair and sat close to me, cradling her mug in her hands. I quickly closed Milena’s email window.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

I made myself laugh. “What do you mean?”

“I’m working here because Frances is an old friend of my mum’s. It doesn’t pay much but the job’s good for making contacts. And it’s Frances’s life. But I don’t understand what’s in it for you.”

I couldn’t tell whether Beth was teasing, curious or suspicious. Had she picked up on some mistake? I tried to change the subject. “What about Milena? What was she in it for?”

“Why are you so curious about her? It’s like an obsession with you—Milena this, Milena that.”

“It’s strange her not being here,” I said. “It’s like going to a play that’s missing the star.”

“It’s funny,” said Beth. “I’d never really known anyone before who died. There was a girl at university who was killed in a car crash but she wasn’t really a friend. I worked with Milena for a year and I’d never met anyone like her and I still wake up in the morning and suddenly remember she’s dead and it comes as a shock each time.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, although I wasn’t thinking of Milena anymore.

When we’d finished our coffee, and Beth had taken my mug away, I told myself I mustn’t look at Milena’s emails, that it was too risky while Beth was there, but I couldn’t help myself. I arranged the screen so that she couldn’t see it and opened a notebook, so that I appeared to be doing accounts, and returned to it with dread and overpowering curiosity.

First—or first in this computer’s memory, going back two years and nine months—there was Donald Blanchard, barrister and colleague of Hugo’s, who called Milena “Panther” and suffered from bursts of anxiety about betraying his friend, not to mention his own wife, which hadn’t stopped him taking Milena to Venice for a weekend.