“Is that what you meant when you said the inquiry wasn’t completely over?”

“Did I?”

“More or less, you said.”

He paused, seeming shifty, ill at ease.

“When this accident happened, or shortly before,” he said, “you had developed suspicions of Mr. Foreman’s role in the case.”

I suddenly felt under threat. “How do you mean?”

“What I’m trying to say, Ms. Falkner,” said Ramsay, in a deliberate tone, as if he was speaking to a child, “is that I’m working under the assumption that you had suspicions of Mr. Foreman and then he realized you had these suspicions and that there was some sort of struggle while you were driving. Perhaps he tried to seize the wheel. And you crashed. Accidentally.”

I thought for a moment. “I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t remember anything about the accident. It’s a blank. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” said DI Ramsay. “That’ll do.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

I walked to Fergus’s house with the box in both hands. It was early, a soft dawn breaking over the rooftops. Even here, in the streets of London, birds were singing all around me. At that time of the morning the volume seemed to have been turned up. I could see the blackbird on the branch of a tree, its throat pulsing.

Fergus was waiting. He opened the door before I knocked and stepped out to join me, kissing me on both cheeks and giving me a small smile.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready.”

We didn’t talk. After twenty minutes or so we left the road and entered the Heath, making our way along the empty paths to the wilderness. We could no longer see the city glittering in the pale sunlight, or hear the noise of cars. I remembered that other dawn when I had walked there: then it had been winter, and I had come alone to talk to Greg. Standing under the boughs of an oak tree, I turned to Fergus.

“It began like this,” I said. “The alarm went off and he woke and reached over to my side of the bed to turn it off, then he kissed me on the mouth and he said, ‘Good morning, gorgeous, did you have nice dreams?’ and I muttered something thickly in reply but he couldn’t make out the words. He got out of bed and pulled on his dressing gown, leaving me still tangled up with sleep. He went downstairs and made us both a cup of tea, and he brought mine upstairs in my stripy mug—which was what he always did, every morning. He watched me struggle up to sitting, half laughing at me. Then he had a quick shower. He sang in the shower, loudly, humming where he couldn’t remember the words. It was “The Long and Winding Road.”