She lay sprawled on her back, the black beret still incongruously on her head. The ugly lopsided face was the colour of tallow, which is also the colour of tripe. I remembered that in France tripe soup was a favoured dish, and for a moment I feared I might be sick. I breathed in and out deeply, but my eyes remained fixed on her face. It was frozen in a ferocious grimace: eyes bulging, mouth open, teeth bared. One received the impression she had been snarling when death found her. Her tongue protruded between her teeth and it looked completely black, but that was probably due to the poor light in the greenhouse.

She had been shot. A lot of blood had oozed from the round hole in the side of her neck – it looked as though some monstrous wasp had stung her there. The bullet seemed to have hit the jugular. Her jacket and the scarf round her neck were stiff with blood and there was more, a congealed pool, surrounding her. The blood too looked black. It was obvious that she had been dead for several hours. Her mobile phone stuck out of a pocket in her breeches. The electric torch and the niblick we had seen her brandish the night before lay beside her, respectively on her left and her right sides. I found myself staring at her hands. On her right she wore a glove, but her left hand was bare. Her nails were long and scarlet and she wore two large-stoned rings.

It was then that I noticed the freakish detail. The little finger of her left hand was as long as her index finger. In some way I knew that to be important, extremely important, only I couldn’t think how.

I started feeling nauseous again and looked away from the corpse. That was the first time I had been inside the greenhouse. I saw shrubs and plants, some as tall as trees, whose names I did not know. Some of the plants were in a state of decay. I remembered Lady Grylls saying she couldn’t afford gardeners. Empty pots – blue-and-white Chinese containers-censers-garden tools. A garden bench. A rickety-looking bamboo table with a matching bamboo chair. A mobile phone lay on the floor beside the chair. I blinked. A second mobile phone? Whose phone was that?