I had also, I thought, told them that Frances had had a lover. Did David know that? I stared at him, his unreadable face. Had he discovered that, and was that why Frances was dead?

“You disapprove of me,” David said. “Of course you do. After all—and let’s put the whole thing with Johnny to one side, just for the moment, shall we?—you think you’re living in a romantic novel where husband and wife marry and live happily ever after, where first love doesn’t fade, where your precious husband couldn’t possibly have deceived you because he loved you so much. What makes you think Frances didn’t know?”

“Did she?”

That dismissive shrug again.

“I’ve no idea. If she did, she would have had the good sense not to muddy the waters. She was sensible. We understood each other. We suited each other.”

“You mean you turned a blind eye?”

“That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that we didn’t snoop, pry and poke around in each other’s worlds, thinking we had a right to know everything about each other. We treated each other like grown-ups. There are worse ways of being married.”

“Are you saying she would have understood about you and Milena?”

“You’ve no right even to ask that. You were an outsider who came blundering into our house, putting your nose into business that didn’t concern you.”

“Did you love her?”

Real anger flared in his face and suddenly he stepped out of the circle of his umbrella so that large drops of water splashed on to his coat. “You want to know what I felt?” he said, his face a few inches from mine. “You still want to find things out? Frances was a good woman and Milena was a bitch. A hard-core, monstrous bitch. Bitches always win. She played with people. She played with me, lured me, hooked me, pulled me in, and when she was done with me she threw me back into the water. She never loved me. She was only interested in me because she could use me to get back at Frances. Yes, yes. I know there was another man in Frances’s life. Milena told me when she dumped me that I had been her revenge on my wife, who’d stolen someone from her.”

As I watched him, he seemed to crumble. His mouth trembled, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry or hit me.

“If you want to know who he was, I can’t tell you. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. I’m not like you. Some things are best kept hidden. We depend on that; we’d go mad if we knew everything. So if this had anything to do with your precious husband, I can’t tell you. Nobody can now. Everyone’s dead.”