'It's my lady friend. I've reason to suspect that she's getting a bit on the side. Well – a man likes to know where he stands. You get me?'

Cordelia fitted the key into the lock.

'I understand, Mr Fielding. Won't you come in?'

P D James

P. D. James was born in Oxford in 1920 and educated at Cambridge High School. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service as an administrator, and the experience she gained from her job helped her with the background for Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower and A Mind to Murder. In 1968 she entered the Home Office as Principal, working with the Police Department concerned with the forensic science service and later in the Criminal Policy Department. She retired in 1979 and is currently a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a governor of the BBC and a member of the boards of the Arts Council and the British Council. P. D. James has twice been the winner of the Silver Dagger Award of the Crime Writers Association and in 1987 was awarded the Diamond Dagger Award for services to crime writing. In 1983 she received the OBE and was created a life peer in 1991. She has been a widow for over twenty-five years and has two children and five grandchildren.

Her other novels include Cover Her Face, Unnatural Causes, Death of an Expert Witness, A Taste for Death and Devices and Desires which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1989. She is co-author, with T. A. Critchley, of The Maul and the Pear Tree. Penguin also publish A Dalgliesh Trilogy, which contains the novels Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower and Death of an Expert Witness.