She reached number seven and knocked at the door. It was opened by a woman in her late sixties, tiny and wiry, with a shock of grey hair and small eyes gleaming behind her glasses. She looked surprised.

‘I’m Carla Morris,’ said Frieda. ‘Veronica Ellison invited me. I hope that’s all right.’

The woman took Frieda’s hand in a firm grip. ‘I’m Ruth Lender,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

Frieda stepped inside and felt a sudden burn of memory. It came from the smell: books, beeswax furniture polish, herbs; it was the dry, clean smell of her own home. For a moment she was standing in the hall of her narrow mews house and a cat was at her ankles.

‘You were a friend of Sandy’s?’

Frieda nodded. She at once liked this woman, as she had liked Veronica. She was glad that Sandy had found friends and at the same time had an acute sense of what she had rejected. She had had several clients over the years who had fallen desperately in love with partners or spouses after they had died: death is a great seducer. She was in no danger of that with Sandy, but there was the feeling that the wretched and angry man of the last eighteen months had receded and the other Sandy, the one of quick intelligence and kindness, was clear to her again. She was glad of that.

‘Carla, you say? I don’t think he mentioned you to me.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘It’s sad, isn’t it, how we want to get back in touch with people once they have died?’

The house was spacious, and shabby in a way that Frieda liked: the kitchen had a rickety wooden dresser in it, and unmatching chairs around the wooden table, on which were dozens of glasses, tumblers, side-plates and a wooden board on which were several oozing cheeses. The large living room was lined with books; piles of papers and periodicals were stacked up by the wall, evidently pushed there to clear a space for the gathering. There were about twenty-five people already in the room, perhaps more. She scanned the faces quickly, waiting for the shock of recognition, but none came. All these people were strangers to her. Some of them obviously knew each other and stood in small groups, holding wine glasses and talking; others stood at the edges of the room, unsure. She saw Veronica with two men, one spindly and fair, the other squat, barrel-chested, with a rumbling voice that carried across to her. A young man pressed a glass into her hand and moved away. The woman next to her caught her eye and smiled shyly, hopefully.

‘My name is Elsie,’ she offered. She had an accent that Frieda couldn’t place.

‘I’m Carla. It’s good to meet you. How did you know Sandy?’

‘I was his cleaner. He was a very nice man.’

‘He was.’

‘Very polite.’

‘Yes.’

‘And tidy too. My work was easy. Although sometimes’ – she lowered her voice – ‘sometimes he broke things.’

‘Broke things?’

‘Yes. Plates. Glasses.’

‘Oh.’ Frieda was nonplussed. ‘You mean, deliberately?’

‘He put them in the bin, but I always knew.’

‘Really?’

‘One woman I worked for used to put all her chocolate wrappers into a tied-up plastic bag in the bin. She was very thin.’ The woman held her hands close together to indicate her employer’s extreme narrowness. ‘But she ate many chocolate bars each day.’

Frieda spoke neutrally, looking away from the woman: ‘So what did Sandy want hidden?’

‘No wrappers. But he was worrying.’

‘How could you tell?’

‘More drink. More cigarettes. More lines in his face. More broken plates. Worry.’

‘I see. Do you know why?’

‘No. We all have worries, after all.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I know there was a woman who left him and he missed her. He told me once, when he had drunk some wine.’

‘Really.’

‘I saw her photo on his desk, before he put it away.’

Frieda tried to maintain her expression of mild interest.

‘Dark and not smiling. Not so beautiful, in my opinion.’

There was a ping of sound as Ruth Lender rang a spoon against the rim of her glass; the room fell unevenly into silence. She was standing at the end of the room, by an upright piano that Frieda now saw had a large framed photo of Sandy on it: a head-and-shoulders portrait of him, in a suit with a white shirt. He was half smiling. His eyes were looking straight at her.

‘It’s good to see you all here,’ Ruth said, as the faces turned to her, solemnly anticipatory. ‘And although none of us wants this to be formal or constrained, it is nevertheless a time for us to talk about Sandy and remember him, each in our own way. Because he died so young, and so shockingly, because there’s a horrible mystery about his death, because there won’t be a funeral yet, it seems important to find ways of talking about our feelings and of saying goodbye to him.’

‘Hear, hear.’ This from the barrel-chested man beside Veronica.

‘In about an hour we will have snacks – most of them inspired by food that Sandy loved – and we know how he loved good food, good wine. Not-so-good wine.’ A ripple of laughter ran through the room. ‘But, first, let’s see if we can express some of the things we feel.’ She paused, took a sip of her wine. Frieda recognized a woman who was used to speaking in public, giving lectures.

‘Some of you have come prepared, I know, but everyone should feel free to have their say – or to remain silent, of course. It’s always hard to break the ice, so I thought I’d begin.’ She reached across to the top of the piano and pulled a small pile of cards from it. ‘But I don’t want to give you my purely personal memories of Sandy – who, by the way, I was responsible for bringing to the university, because I considered him smart and imaginative and forward-thinking, and I never for an instant regretted it. I’ve spoken to colleagues and some of his students, people who can’t be here today, and they’ve given me sentences or phrases or single words that they thought summed him up.’

She took another sip of her wine, then put it on the piano, and pushed her glasses more firmly into place.

‘So, here goes. Terrifyingly clever … Didn’t suffer fools gladly … Intellectual in the best sense of the word … Better than me at poker. Handsome … Cool … A dab hand at the cutting remark … Someone you wanted on your side … He had a nice laugh … A man whose good opinion I valued … He was the best teacher I ever had and I wish I’d told him that … I will miss him … I was a bit scared of him, to be honest … Very competitive … He had a fearsome backhand spin … He loved blue cheese and red wine … Complicated … Mysterious …’

Frieda listened as the words continued. She was remembering Sandy as she had seen him outside the Warehouse, his face contorted in anger, and then suddenly she saw him the first time they had gone back to his flat, his face smoothed out with happiness so that he looked younger and more innocent. She would hold onto that.

Someone else was standing up now, a tall, gangly man with angular features and quick gestures, who introduced himself as Sandy’s close colleague; he was talking about a conference he and Sandy had been to, an argument about the artificial notion of self that continued through the night with Sandy fresh and vigorous, drinking whisky. At times, the man’s voice became husky and he had to stop, clear his throat. When he was done, Veronica came forward.

‘I just want to say a couple of things.’ Her cheeks were flushed and Frieda could tell that she was nervous. ‘As some of you in the room know, Sandy and I had our ups and downs. I saw him when he was vulnerable and I saw him when he was harsh, even cruel at times, though I think he was really a very kind man. One of the words used about him earlier was “complicated”, and he certainly was. But he was the real deal. He’d lived, he’d loved, he’d suffered. None of us here knows why he died, but the person who killed him killed someone who is irreplaceable and will be missed by all of us.’