“I imagine not.” At last I heard the current of anger in his voice. “Shall I come to yours?”

“No, I don’t want that either.”

“I have a cast-iron alibi, you know, Eleanor.” He gave a light emphasis to my name, to remind me that I had been an impostor. “If you’re imagining that I might be a murderer, you needn’t trouble yourself.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, although of course I had thought about David murdering Frances, and had found it very easy to picture: he was a cold, clever, ruthless man, rather than a messy creature of conscience. However, the reason for keeping him out of my house was not fear but an instinctive, deeply felt revulsion at the idea of him setting his well-polished brogues in my own shabby, Greg-haunted world.

“We could meet in my club, if you want. There are private rooms.”

“No. Somewhere outside, public.”

“All right, Blackfriars Bridge. North side. In one hour.”

“It’s raining,” I said stupidly.

“Indeed. I’ll bring my umbrella.”

I hung up and ran my wrist under cold water for several minutes until it went numb. I considered changing out of my work clothes but in the end I didn’t. After all, I no longer needed to pretend to be anyone other than myself. I searched in the cupboard under the stairs for an umbrella, but only found one with a broken spoke, which flopped uselessly when opened. I would just have to get wet.

I ARRIVED WET and cold, smelling of glue and dressed in paint-spattered canvas trousers under a streaming waterproof. David was as dry as a bone under his large black umbrella.

I stopped a few feet from where he stood on the deserted pavement, and gave him a stiff nod. His beautiful camel-hair coat was familiar, as were the brown shoes that shone like new conkers. I couldn’t have pointed to any particular change in his appearance, yet I was struck by a difference in him. His skin seemed to be drawn tighter over his bones than the last time we’d met, giving him a pinched, sharp expression.

“This won’t take long,” he said.

I waited. He had asked to see me and I wasn’t going to be the first to speak.

“My wife trusted you,” he said. I didn’t respond. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say. “She liked you,” he went on. “For once she showed bad judgment. Catastrophically bad judgment.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

David gave a shrug. “That’s for the police to decide,” he said indifferently.

“Did she trust you as well?”

“You mean, because I was unfaithful to her? I know, of course, what you told the police.”

“I told the police what was true—that you had an affair with Milena.”