Gradually the pain in my chest eased and I could look at the screen again. I put away the messages from the anonymous lovers for the moment and browsed through the in-box to see if anything relevant cropped up. There were various messages from “S,” cranky and intemperate. I looked at a couple of messages from her to him and recognized the flirtatious tone she reserved for certain men, very different from the brisker style she adopted with Frances, Beth or female clients. It seemed a very particular sort of betrayal to be reading Beth’s mail while she was sitting in the same room but, then, I was becoming something of a connoisseur of betrayal.

I was about to open a message from Milena’s husband when I heard the front door open and Frances hurried down the stairs, looking flushed. “Hi!” she said, tossing her coat on to the sofa and coming over to kiss my cheek, which felt hot with shame and anxiety. “Sorry I was away so long.”

“That’s OK.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Just clearing things up a bit,” I mumbled. Couldn’t she tell that everything was exactly as it had been when she had left, not a single piece of paper moved or dealt with?

“Good,” she said. “You mustn’t work too hard, though.”

“No, no, I didn’t.”

She looked at Beth. “Could you make us some tea, darling?”

Beth pulled a face, got up and left the room with obvious reluctance.

Frances came over and stood close by me. “It’s been good having you here,” she said, in a subdued tone. “I haven’t said this to you—well, I haven’t said it to anyone—but when Milena died I thought I might give up the business.”

“Really?”

“To be honest, even before that things hadn’t been going well. Milena had . . .” Frances paused. “Let’s just say that a lot of what brought me into the business seemed to have gone away.”

“So things were bad before she died?”

There was another long pause, in which Frances’s face took on a troubled expression I hadn’t seen before. “It’s all in the past now,” she said finally, “and it’s not what I wanted to talk about. Maybe another time. We could go out for lunch—or dinner, even.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

“You’re easy to talk to and, to be honest, I need advice. There are things I need to say out loud.”

I didn’t know how to respond; I felt my deceit must be written across my face. I made an indeterminate sound and stared at my hands, my ringless finger.

“What I was going to say,” Frances continued, “is that I know David was talking to you but I wanted to ask you formally if you’d think of staying on.”

“Here?” I asked stupidly.

“That was the general idea.”