‘It was you and your daughter who visited the orphanage?’

‘Yes. When we went there, I was told that the children might not react to me well. Most Bulgarian orphanage workers are female, so the children had limited experience with men. And, of course, Zlatka had never known her father.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, the first time we saw Zlatka, we were in the director’s office, the only freshly painted room in the orphanage. A carer brought her in and put her down on a rug for us to look at her. Lindsay said afterwards that she instantly felt a sort of gaping emptiness in her stomach filling up with love. She said in that moment, she became Zlatka’s mother.’

Fry said nothing. She didn’t personally understand the urges being described.

‘I never questioned her about that,’ said Lowther, interpreting her sceptical expression. ‘There are some things we can’t understand about each other, we just have to take them on faith. That instinct was something I could never feel myself. But I didn’t doubt it in Lindsay. It was the most powerful emotion I’d ever seen in her. Stronger than when she had either of the boys. It doesn’t make sense, does it? But that was the way it was.’

He looked questioningly at his wife, who nodded slowly but didn’t speak.

‘There were some really bad times after that first occasion, you know,’ he said. ‘But Lindsay said she could always bring back the feeling of that moment she saw Zlatka. She said it was sometimes the only thing that stopped her from giving up.’

‘What do you mean by bad times, sir?’

Lowther didn’t seem to hear her, and she had to ask the question again. He stirred from the window, staring at her vaguely.

‘Oh, there were so many difficulties. Bulgarian adoptions require court approval – a notoriously slow process. It took months even to set a date for a hearing, and we were told that many adoptions required more than one hearing. Miss Shepherd was a great help, giving us advice all along the line, helping us to understand the rules, explaining all the bureaucracy. But at the first hearing, the judge refused our application. He said there were minor problems in the paperwork. We had to hire a Bulgarian attorney to correct the errors, then the court had to schedule another date. The process seemed to go on for ever. I remember there was a sort of prosecuting attorney, who was employed to point out legal problems. He was a tall man with black hair and broad shoulders, and he wore a bright red robe. We started to refer to him as Satan.’

‘All right. But this must have been, what – twelve months ago?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Luanne was six months old when we brought her out of Bulgaria.’

‘She’s been slow to develop in a lot of ways,’ said Mrs Lowther. ‘But that’s because of her background. When we got her, she could just about grasp a rattle, and her head still flopped about when we sat her up. She had no idea how to feed herself.’

‘The boys were much more advanced than that, so it was a bit of a shock for Lindsay,’ added her husband.

Mrs Lowther smiled sadly. ‘Luanne’s eighteen months old now, and she babbles to herself all the time, but she has difficulty forming words, even “mummy” and “daddy”. She tends to repeat the last word of anything that people say to her. She’s very restless physically, isn’t she, Henry?’

‘She certainly is. And she can be very emotional, too – she laughs and cries almost at the same time.’

‘And she’s still having trouble sleeping through the night, I believe, sir?’ said Fry.

Lowther hesitated. ‘Oh?’

‘Your son-in-law said that’s why Luanne was staying here on the night of the fire, to give Lindsay a bit of respite.’

‘Oh, that’s right,’ said Lowther. ‘Luanne is still suffering from separation anxiety. Lindsay and Brian should have learned how to let her cry before now, but they couldn’t. It’s always a difficult thing to do, of course. As a parent, you can’t ignore your child when it’s calling for you.’

Fry wasn’t impressed. Henry Lowther didn’t look like a man who’d get up in the middle of the night to attend to a crying baby, but she might be misjudging him.

‘So explain to me again how you came to meet with Rose Shepherd in Matlock Bath last weekend.’

‘Oh, that was a mistake. I ought to have known it was a mistake from the start. But Lindsay seized on the idea so eagerly, you see. She wanted to say thank you to Miss Shepherd for helping her to get Luanne. I told Lindsay that she should be thankful for what she had and put all the stuff in Bulgaria behind her. But it became almost an obsession with her. You know what women can be like. Well, that was what our daughter was like, anyway. Once she got an idea into her head, it couldn’t be shifted.’

‘So you set up a meeting?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must have had some way of getting in touch with Miss Shepherd, then.’

‘There was an email address. It was one of those free web-based accounts where you don’t have to give any details of your identity to sign up. You only have to provide a name, but you can make that up. Everyone does it.’

‘I see. Well, we’d like that email address, please, sir.’

‘I’ll find it for you. You know, I don’t think she can have checked her email very often. It took her some weeks to reply to my message. In fact, I suspected she wasn’t going to respond at all. I thought she must have changed her email account, or died even. I didn’t know, at the time.’

‘You weren’t aware that Miss Shepherd was living nearby?’

Lowther laughed. ‘No, that was the amazing thing. But she didn’t know Britain very well, so this might have been the first place she thought of. Ironic, isn’t it? I was stunned when she suggested meeting in Matlock Bath. In my own mind, I’d been thinking of a city somewhere, maybe even London. The anonymity of crowds, you know. But apparently she didn’t travel very far once she got into that house at Foxlow.’

‘She told you where she lived, then? Was that information in her email, or did she tell you when you met her in the Riber Tea Rooms?’

‘Neither,’ said Lowther. ‘No, she didn’t give away anything like that. I read about the house in Foxlow in the papers, and then saw it on the TV news. As I said, I was stunned. To think Miss Shepherd was only a few miles away from us. Do you think it was deliberate on her part, to move into Derbyshire?’

‘We don’t know. But there are a lot of things we don’t know about Rose Shepherd.’

‘I can’t help you very much, I’m afraid. She didn’t share any information about her private life.’

‘Talking about sharing information – Mr Lowther, why didn’t you come forward and tell us you knew Rose Shepherd when you heard the news about her death?’

‘Why? Good God, don’t you think we’ve been a bit too busy with our own concerns to pay attention to the news? The last four days have been a complete blur.’ Lowther started to go red in the face as he warmed to the subject. ‘Our lives have been turned upside down by the fire, you know. We’ve been backwards and forwards to the hospital and the mortuary, visiting Brian, identifying the bodies of our daughter and our grandchildren, making statements to the police, taking calls from our family and friends, fending off the press, doing our best to look after Brian and Luanne. Not to mention John. My wife has been exhausted with it all. She’s cried herself to sleep every night. And you think we’ve just been sitting around watching TV?’

‘All right.’

Fry waited for him to calm down. Perhaps she’d been a bit unreasonable. But after the experience with Darren Turnbull, this silence about Rose Shepherd on the part of the public was starting to feel like a conspiracy.

‘Besides,’ said Lowther, ‘nothing happened at our meeting. Nothing of any significance.’

‘You just made small talk?’

‘It was all a bit awkward, really. Once we’d said what we’d gone to say, there was nothing else to talk about. After a while, Miss Shepherd gave Lindsay a gift for Luanne, then she left. She seemed quite nervous, glad to get away.’