‘Put a damper on the evening?’

‘Did rather.’

‘So you went home?’

‘Yes.’ She looked sheepish, avoiding eye contact.

‘Straight home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Straight to bed?’

‘Yes. It was the only thing to do. The atmosphere was tense. You could have cut it with a knife. We all went to our rooms and shut ourselves off from each other, and the world. I think Rufus and I hoped we would wake up to find that it was a terrible dream.’

‘When did you last see your parents?’

‘On the Sunday afternoon. Rufus had left by then. I stayed on for an hour, talking to Mummy, then drove to London.’

‘So you were at work on the Monday morning?’

‘Yes. I worked hard. For the first time I realized that I needed my job. I also needed the normality.’

‘Someone will verify that you were at work on Monday of this week?’

‘Yes…my colleagues…why?’

‘No reason…just a routine question, no need to be worried.’

‘Oh…’ But Hennessey felt her relief was palpable. ‘Tell me about your father.’

‘He was a queer fish. He was two people in one, hale-fellow well-met to the world, a tyrant at home. Poor Rufus…when he was growing up the only thing he could do without permission was to breathe, and he was lucky to do that. Mummy went along with him, she couldn’t stand up to him.’

‘And he squandered all the money? Doesn’t sound like a tyrant.’

‘Sounds like a hale-fellow-well-met, though, doesn’t it? I told you he was two personalities in one.’

‘Tell me about your uncle? The one who left your father all that money.’

‘Uncle Marcus?’ She looked nervously at Hennessey.

‘Yes.’

‘He was my father’s younger brother.’

‘He died before his time then?’

Nicola Williams nodded. She avoided eye contact and Hennessey sensed that he was rising a deer. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he scented a chase and a shiver ran down his spine. He knew the need for caution.

‘Well…yes…’

‘How did he die?’

‘He drowned in the bath. Dozens of people do each year.’

‘The coroner returned an open verdict. Why do you think he did that?’

Nicola Williams looked uncomfortable.

A pause.

‘Miss Williams, if you’ve got something to tell me it’s really in your extreme best interest to do so.’

‘It’s nothing criminal.’

‘What then?’

‘It’s an awful skeleton in the family cupboard.’

‘So tell me; if it’s not relevant to the enquiry it won’t go beyond these four walls.’

‘It’s not relevant.’

‘That’s for me to decide.’

‘He was a cretin. He suffered cretinism. He was about three feet high.’

‘That’s not much of a skeleton as skeletons go.’

‘That’s not the skeleton.’

‘Oh?’

‘His mother—my grandmama—tried to drown him. She was what in today’s politically correct times would be called a “lookist”.’

‘Ah…’

‘His condition began to become apparent when he was about ten or twelve, up to then he’d been normal if a little frail…when cretinism was diagnosed, she tried to drown him…she made a determined effort, locked him and her in the bathroom…he managed to scream and Grandfather kicked the door in and saved his life. He grew up with a fear of drowning, hence the showers. He also had a lake filled in.’

‘A lake?’

‘He bought a large house which had a lake in the grounds. The first thing he did was to have the lake filled in. That’s the skeleton. It didn’t come out at the inquest because the family don’t talk about it, let alone want it made public.’

Hennessey had a sense of having made serious headway, but he was unsure as to the direction. ‘That’s a family secret?’

‘Well-kept. I only found out about it last year, or the year before, when Mummy and I were walking in the garden at the Grange.’

‘Does your brother know the story?’

‘I don’t think he does. That’s where Daddy gets his obsession with appearance from, his mother was such a lookist…if it didn’t look right it had to go. Poor Marcus couldn’t live up to the Williams image, nor to the Sieff image - Sieff being Grandmama’s maiden name - so he had to go.’

‘Where is your grandmother now?’

‘In a nursing home. Her mind has gone.’

‘Lucky her, in a sense.”Part of me wishes they had involved the police and had her charged with attempted infanticide. Ten years in a women’s prison would have done wonders for her attitude.’

Hennessey nodded. She had a sense of justice. He liked that about her as well.

That evening, Hennessey packed an overnight bag and drove from Easingwold to the village of Skelton with its tenth century church. He parked on the road beside a rambling mock-Tudor detached house and crunched up the gravel drive. He was pleased for the owner that gravel had been laid, for his money gravel and a dog were still the best burglar deterrents by far. The garage which was built into the house, integral, he believed the word for such was, had both doors shut and padlocked. The family’s car was tucked up for the night. He rang the bell at the front door and was greeted warmly.

In the house, cup of tea in hand, he sat at the long kitchen table and helped Daniel with his maths homework. It was pre-secondary school level and so Hennessey could cope with it. Just. Later he picked up a magazine for teenage girls and began to leaf through it.

‘You shouldn’t be reading that, George.’

‘Oh?’ Hennessey smiled at Dianne, fourteen, whose magazine he was reading. ‘Well, you see, that’s where you’re wrong, the quickest way to find out how someone’s mind works is to read their choice of magazine - not their choice of books, or their choice of newspaper but their choice of magazine, especially the ads at the back - and I want to know what makes the mind of a teenage girl tick. I want to know what your prejudices and conceits are…but if it upsets you?’

‘No…’ the girl replied warmly. Then she paused and said, ‘George, what happened to your wife?’

‘Dianne.’ Her mother turned from the kitchen work surface and glared at her.

‘I don’t mind.’ Hennessey put the magazine down. ‘She died,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago now, thirty years, more in fact, she’d just given birth to our son Charles - he’s a barrister now - and was already talking about number two…she was walking in the centre of Easingwold, that’s where we lived, and where I still live…about this time of year…hot and sunny, and she just folded up…just collapsed…it was in the middle of the afternoon, folk rushed to her assistance assuming that she’d fainted. Fortunately, Charles wasn’t with her at the time…she’d left him with a neighbour…but she was dead. Life had just left her.’

‘What caused it?’

Hennessey upturned the palm of his hand and raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Who knows?’ Then he said, ‘You see, Dianne, as I have grown older I have come to believe that if the sum of human knowledge was represented as a tennis ball, then on the same scale, the sum of what we don’t know but is fact and awaiting discovery could be represented as a basketball. At the time of Jennifer’s death, and still today, the best the medics could come up with was “Sudden Death Syndrome”. It happens - rarely, but it happens. Often the person is a young adult in good health, they’re walking down the street or sitting at home and life just leaves them. It just goes, suddenly, without warning, as if the person has been switched off. But don’t fear it, there are many, many other things to fear before you need fear SDS. But that’s what took my wife. She was twenty-three.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you, but there’s no need to be…I still cherish her memory and I believe that she’s still in the garden she planned just before she died. I’ll never give up my house because of that. Sometimes I go into the garden and sit and talk to her.

I’m mad…but I do it.’

Later that evening, when Fiona had returned from the stables, and she and Dianne and Daniel had the upper floor to themselves and were ‘shifting’ themselves to bed, which involved running backwards and forwards along the landing many times, squabbling over the use of their bathroom (the house had two, one designated for adults, the other for children), Hennessey and the lady of the house sat quietly in the kitchen and Hennessey said, ‘Can I pick your brains?’