I turned to Sarah, as so often before, for sympathy and advice. She was naturally curious about the sour and sudden end my enquiries on Bella’s behalf had come to and suggested we meet at Sapperton, where she had to go on Sunday to do some “clearing out” at The Old Parsonage.

It was the last day of October, mild, dank and breathlessly still. I stopped at the cemetery on my way into the village and visited Rowena’s grave for the first time. It stood beside her mother’s, with fresh flowers in both urns, matching headstones and echoing inscriptions. I remembered Louise’s well enough: First Known When Lost. But now the words seemed dense with bitter unintended irony. Which only heightened the poignancy of the phrase of Thomas’s Sarah had found to commemorate her sister.

ROWENA CLAUDETTE BRYANT,

NÉE PAXTON

23 MAY 1971-17 JUNE 1993

THE SUN USED TO SHINE

In my mind, I was on Hergest Ridge again, turning slowly, like a teetotum about to fall. Take all, half or nothing. The chances were always as slender, the mathematics of unpredictability as unyielding. I walked back to the gate, my shoes crunching in the gravel, an illusion of some fainter step behind me garlanding itself around the surrounding silence. The wrought-iron railings of the gate met my hand as the balustrade of the bridge must have met Rowena’s. For an instant, I could see the abyss and sense its appeal, its strange gaping allure. To jump. And leave it all behind. But I couldn’t. There was only the ground beneath my feet. Only the close grey sky above my head. Only the future to face.

And Sarah, of course. She was the one among us who seemed the most resilient as well as the most perceptive. She didn’t ignore reality or buckle under it. She defied it to do its worst, then retaliated by leading a normal well-balanced life. Not for her Rowena’s despair or Sir Keith’s refusal to recognize the truth or even Bella’s eagerness to subvert it. I knew I could rely on Sarah to do what had to be done. I knew I could look to her for answers as well as questions.

The “clearing out” she’d mentioned on the phone turned out to be rather more than that. She was removing all the family’s personal possessions prior to the arrival of tenants on a six-month lease. As she explained, Sir Keith had only kept the place as a weekend retreat for her and Rowena, then for Rowena and Paul. They had no use for it now. It was time to close another chapter.

We went down to the Daneway Inn for lunch and sat outside, scarfed and sweatered against the chill. I described my trips to Cambridge, Albany and Bordeaux. I left nothing out, reckoning Sarah if anyone deserved to hear it all. After the reappraisal she’d been forced to make of her mother’s character, the extent of her stepmother’s selfishness was no big deal. Besides, Bella’s desertion of her father was something Sarah had already anticipated.

“The sooner she goes the better. Perhaps then Daddy will be able to come to terms with what’s happened.”

“You think he will?”

“Eventually. There’s still quite a lot of time for all of us to prepare ourselves.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“I’m trying to. So’s Paul, I suppose.”

“Have you seen him recently?”

“No. I have nothing to say to him. But I met Martin Hill the other day. He’d been round to see Paul.”

“Did he say how he seemed?”

“Yes. Martin was expecting some histrionics, I think. But instead he got what you got. This immense chilling calm. Paul’s reading the Bible, apparently. I don’t mean he’s dipping into it. I mean he’s reading it from cover to cover, memorizing whole chunks. Can you believe it? He sits in that house, with Rowena’s possessions-Rowena’s memories-thick about him, reading the Bible. All day every day as far as I know.”

I shook my head, admitting my unwillingness as well as my inability to guess the state of his mind. I’d start feeling sorry for him, I knew, if I tried to imagine his plight. And I didn’t want to feel anything for him, even contempt. I didn’t want to share Naylor’s innocence or Paul’s guilt. I didn’t want to rail against an injustice or rejoice at its correction. All I craved now was what I could only have had if I’d read the newspaper articles and watched the television reports back in July 1990-and said absolutely nothing. Uninvolvement. Indifference. The stranger’s sanctuary. Which for better or worse I’d turned my back on.

“I came across something this morning that might interest you,” Sarah said suddenly, reaching into her handbag and taking out a pocket diary, which she laid on the table in front of me. The red leather cover had the year embossed on it in gold. 1990. “It’s Mummy’s. Returned by the police at some stage, I suppose. Daddy must have hung on to it, then forgotten he had it.”

I reached out and picked the diary up, turning it over in my hand. I wanted to open it at once, to rifle its secrets. But I needed Sarah’s permission to camouflage my desire. “May I?” I said.

“Of course. There’s not much. Mummy was no diarist. Just the usual. Hair appointments. Telephone numbers. Flight times. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Dinner dates. Deadlines. What you’d expect. The normal everyday fixtures of life.”

Already I was flicking through the pages, seeing her handwriting for the first time, sensing her fingers close to mine as she penned the entries. Sarah was right. There was nothing unusual. But even mundanity can be portentous. Wednesday March 7: Oscar’s Private View. Allinson Gallery, Cambridge, 6.30. I turned on. Friday March 16: Collect pictures from Allinson p.m. My gaze flicked to the next day. Saturday March 17: Take pictures to Kington. There it was, then. Confirmation of Sophie’s claim. According to her, that was the day Louise had met her “perfect stranger” on Hergest Ridge. “The weather was unusually warm for March. She wanted a breath of fresh air. You were there for the same reason, I suppose.” But it wasn’t me. It never had been.

“Look at the entry for April the fifth, though,” said Sarah. “That’s not quite so normal.”

Thursday April 5: Atascadero, 3.30. I frowned. “What does it mean?”

“It was just a hunch, but when I checked with directory enquiries and phoned the place, it turned out to be right. Atascadero is a café in Covent Garden. The one where Mummy met Paul to give him his marching orders.”

“So this corroborates his confession.”

“Yes. I suppose I shall have to bring it to the attention of the police. But there’s something else. Something much more significant to my mind, though I doubt they’ll agree.”

“What?”

“Turn to the week of her death.”

I leafed through to the week containing 17 July. There was only one entry. An Air France flight number and departure time for the morning of Monday 16 July. Nothing else. But why should there be? By 18 July, she was dead. “What of it?” I said.

“Turn on.”

I did so. But there were only blank weeks, their days and dates printed on empty uncreased pages. No trips. No appointments. No aides-mémoires. Nothing.

“Don’t you see? There should be something. I don’t know. A dental check-up. A hotel booking. Some trivial commitment. But there isn’t a single one. It’s as if-”

“She knew she was going to die.”

“I remember Rowena saying that. I remember telling her not to be so absurd. And now there it is, in Mummy’s handwriting. A full stop. An end. A void.”

“That she chose to step into.”

“But she can’t have done, can she? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It could simply have been a precaution,” I suggested. “She might have refrained from putting her plans for the rest of the summer down on paper in case your father got hold of the diary and deduced from the entries that she was planning to leave him.”