“Hi,” said Cheryl, smiling faintly. “We met last year.” She was a tall slim fashionably casual woman of thirty or so, not quite as smart and self-confident as Paul but nearly so, with short dark hair, a direct gaze and a hint somewhere at the back of her eyes that she was on her best behaviour for her parents’ sake.

“We told Cheryl you were coming,” said Mr. Bryant. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I’m glad you did. Will your other daughter be-”

“Ally lives in Canada,” said Cheryl. “Well out of it.”

There was an edge to the remark her father seemed to feel he couldn’t ignore. “We haven’t told Allison, Mr. Timariot. There seemed no point burdening her with it. Not before we have to, anyway.”

“We’re forgetting our manners,” said Mrs. Bryant abruptly. “Please sit down, Mr. Timariot. Would you like some tea?”

“Thanks. That would be nice.”

“I’ll make it,” said Cheryl, heading for the kitchen with the eagerness of somebody glad of any excuse to leave the room.

“Use the cups and saucers,” her mother cried after her, before turning to me with a blush. “I do so hate mugs. Don’t you?”

“Well, I…”

“Mr. Timariot hasn’t come here to talk about crockery, love,” said Mr. Bryant, patting his wife’s hand. They sat on the sofa facing me, a pitiful optimism blooming in their expressions. Could I somehow, they seemed to be wondering, put matters right? Could I turn the clock back to their son’s blameless childhood and correct the fault before it was too late? “It goes without saying that we’re… very sorry… very sorry indeed… about all this…”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You wonder if it is, though,” he said, frowning down at the carpet between us. “You bring them up as best you can. You give them so many things you never had yourself. So many advantages. And then…”

“He was such a good-natured baby,” Mrs. Bryant remarked. Then, as if aware how irrelevant the observation was, she launched herself on another tangent. “Sir Keith must feel this dreadfully, he really must. My heart goes out to him.”

“It must be just as bad for you,” I said.

Mr. Bryant nodded and flexed his hands. “He came here last weekend. Paul, I mean. Sat us down and told us. From the chair you’re sitting in now. Calm as you like. Poured it all out.”

“Awful,” murmured Mrs. Bryant.

“Said he hoped we’d understand. But how can you understand that?” He sat forward and stared at me. “I’m afraid I lost my rag. I hit him, you know. For the first time in his life, I actually hit him. I was angry, you see. But he wasn’t. Even then. He was so… controlled. I hardly recognized him as my son.”

“He was never a violent boy,” said Mrs. Bryant. “Secretive. But never violent. That’s why I can’t believe it.”

Mr. Bryant gave me a confidential smile, as if to say: “That’s motherhood for you.” But fatherhood, apparently, wasn’t quite so blinkered. “He didn’t make it up, love. We’re going to have to accept it. At least he’s owned up. Better late than never.”

“Why do you think he’s owned up now?” I asked.

“He said it was because of Rowena,” answered Cheryl as she bustled into the room with the tea tray. “Said he couldn’t stand it any longer.”

“So some good’s come out of poor Rowena’s…” Mr. Bryant adjusted his glasses and looked at me as Cheryl moved between us with the cups. Suicide was the word. But he couldn’t bring himself to pronounce it. Or murder, come to that. The truth could only be approached obliquely. “At least an innocent man won’t be kept in prison much longer,” he concluded with a sigh.

“You’re sure he is innocent?” I said at once, seizing the opportunity now it had been presented to me.

“Well… aren’t you?”

“Not entirely. Bella… Lady Paxton, I mean… and I have considered the possibility that Paul might be confessing to the murders in order to punish himself for Rowena’s suicide.”

“You mean…” Mr. Bryant’s brow furrowed. He looked round at his wife and daughter. “You mean he might…”

“Not have done it?” put in Mrs. Bryant, her eyes wide with sudden hope.

But Cheryl was too realistic to be taken in. And in no hurry to let her parents be. “That’s crazy,” she said, looking straight at me.

“Not necessarily.”

“I heard him say it, Mr. Timariot. All of it. And it was all true.”

“I heard him myself. And it was convincing, certainly. But there’s a possibility-no more, I grant you-that he might be lying.”

“Because he feels responsible for Rowena’s death? Come on.”

“It’s true he’s never got over it,” said Mr. Bryant. “But I can’t believe-”

“What about the postcard?” His wife had seized her husband’s elbow and jerked forward in her chair, spilling tea into her saucer. “I told you I didn’t imagine it.”

Mr. Bryant sighed. “Not that again.” He shook his head and looked across at me. “You know Paul went round Europe by train that summer, Mr. Timariot?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, he sent us several postcards. Half a dozen all told, I should think. Just tourist stuff. The Eiffel Tower. The Acropolis. That sort of thing. I can’t remember much about them. But Dot seems to think-”

“One of them was of Mount Blank, Mr. Timariot,” his wife put in. “And that place he told his friend he was going to when they split up…”

“Chamonix?”

“Yes. It’s right underneath Mount Blank, isn’t it? I looked it up in the atlas.”

“Are you saying the card was posted in Chamonix?”

“Well… Not exactly. I don’t recall where…”

“And she’s thrown it away since,” Mr. Bryant explained.

“I thought I’d kept them,” Mrs. Bryant said stubbornly. “For the stamps. I can’t think how they came to be-”

“Dot’s a great one for clear-outs,” said her husband, with a rueful smile.

“It must have been some peak in the Austrian Alps, Mum,” said Cheryl, her tone suggesting she’d already heard enough of the topic.

But Mrs. Bryant wasn’t to be moved, even though her excruciating mispronunciation of Mont Blanc only underlined her capacity for error-as well as self-delusion. “It was Mount Blank,” she insisted.

“Maybe it was,” said Cheryl, glancing at me as she spoke. “Maybe Paul sent it specifically to make us think he’d been to Chamonix. But when and where was it posted? That’s the question.”

“I don’t know.” Her mother was becoming irritated now. “I didn’t take down the details of the postmark.”

“What does Paul say?” I asked, anxious to calm the waters.

“We haven’t asked him,” Mr. Bryant replied. “He’d gone by the time Dot thought of it.”

“And the card’s gone too,” said Cheryl. “So there’s not really much point talking about it, is there?”

“Perhaps not,” I said, still trying to sound like the embodiment of sweet reason. “But it’s the sort of thing that could be helpful. If Paul is lying, some little slip he’s made is what will find him out. I mean, if he wasn’t in Kington on the night in question, he must have been somewhere else, mustn’t he? And somebody must have seen him there.”

Cheryl sighed. “He wasn’t anywhere else.”

“But supposing he was… for the sake of argument… Then-and on those other occasions. In Cambridge and-”

“He did stay up there after the end of term,” tolled Mrs. Bryant’s mournful voice. “I remember that.”

“During the Easter vacation that year, then. Did he seem… in a strange mood?”

“He was always in a strange mood,” said Cheryl. “From birth, as far as I could tell.”

Mr. Bryant looked round sharply at her, then said: “Paul’s never been what you’d call open. It’s never been easy to know what’s going on inside his head.”

“We know now,” murmured Cheryl.

Her mother, meanwhile, had been casting her mind back to April 1990. “He seemed the same as usual, Mr. Timariot. Like Norman says, he’s always had a… private nature. Never one to make friends easily, our Paul.”

“Or at all,” Cheryl threw in.