“You must know that when people have adopted a position in a controversy, if they encounter evidence that contradicts it, that just entrenches them more strongly in the view they already hold. He had no answer to that. Well, no real answer. He just said every case had aspects to it that didn’t fit together and it was never possible to dot every i and cross every t. He saw no reason to reopen the case and he might even have said something about my needing to get a life or some cliché like that. He made it painfully clear that he didn’t want to see any more of me or my theory. So I gathered up my charts and left, and now I’m here telling you about it and I don’t expect you to be any more sympathetic than Detective Inspector Carter was.”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” said Judy.

“What’s that?”

“How did you compile the chart about Milena?” said Judy. “I can understand how you could reconstruct the movements of your husband, but how could you do it for someone you didn’t know?”

I cursed myself silently. Lying was so much harder than telling the truth because the truth fitted together automatically. “It wasn’t exactly a chart,” I said in desperation. “I had bits of information from here and there.”

Judy leaned toward me and her face took on a shrewd expression. “Ellie, are there things you’re not telling me?”

“Not relevant things,” I said, with an uneasy sense that, as I spoke, my nose ought to have been growing like Pinocchio’s.

There was a silence during which Judy looked at her watch again.

“I should probably go,” I said.

“What would you say if you were sitting where I’m sitting listening to you?”

“I’d probably think I was mad,” I said. “But, then, when I’ve heard a tape of myself speaking I’ve always hated my voice. It sounds different from the inside. In the end, I don’t really care about convincing other people. I knew the police wouldn’t be interested, but I felt I had a responsibility as a citizen to tell them what I’d discovered. I need to know the truth. It’s as simple as that. As long as I know, I don’t care what else happens.”