By the Pricking of My Thumbs

A death that is yet to take place but is believed to have happened some twenty years earlier? Antonia was to think afterwards that it was the kind of ingenious idea crime writers played around with in their idle hours, while luxuriating in a hot bath, or scanning the Times obituaries, beguiled by the seeming impossibility of it, but later discarded as too fanciful, not really worth working through and weaving a whole novel around.

It was 28th July. In the evening, her first back in London since she had returned from her walking tour in Germany’s Black Forest, her son and daughter-in-law paid her a visit, bringing with them her beloved granddaughter Emma. Antonia was delighted to see them. She was also glad of the diversion. Something had been troubling her the whole day – she had felt inexplicable twinges of anxiety, the odd sensation of standing under a dark cloud. Once or twice she had even felt like crying.

Emma seemed to have grown bigger in her absence, as bright and happy a child as could be, looking enchanting in her black shirt and baggy blue trousers, her golden curls peeping from under a black beret.

‘Look at her. She’s destined for the catwalk,’ David said.

‘No way,’ Bethany, her daughter-in-law, said. ‘She’ll be a writer, like Granny.’ Bethany was a former model and strikingly beautiful. David had met her four years before, in Cannes, where he had been sent by Tatler on a photographic assignment. Bethany was disillusioned with the whole pret-a-porter business and regarded the two years she had devoted to it as wasted.

‘One book does not a writer make,’ said Antonia with a smile. ‘Still, sweet of you to say so.’

‘Why-tah!’ Emma cried and banged her fists on the table. ‘Why-tah!’ She banged them again.