‘It’s not going well at all,’ she said now. ‘There’s hardly anyone here.’ She knew she sounded ungracious, but couldn’t help herself. ‘You’d think people would come, if only for the free wine and the chance to see Roddy Sinclair.’

‘But the people who are here are interested,’ he said. ‘Look.’

She turned away from him and back into the room. Perez was right. People had turned their attention from the wine and the music and had begun to promenade around the gallery, looking at the paintings, stopping occasionally to concentrate on something specific. The space was evenly divided between her work and Bella’s. The exhibition had been designed as a Bella Sinclair retrospective. She was showing thirty years’ worth of art; pictures and drawings had been pulled in from collections all over the country. The invitation for Fran to show with her had come out of the blue.

‘You should be proud,’ Perez said. She wasn’t quite sure how to react. She hoped that he would say something flattering about her work. Tonight, jittery and exposed, she could use the flattery.

But his attention was turned to the visitors. ‘There’s someone who seems very keen.’ She followed his gaze to a middle-aged man, who was smart in an arty, unbuttoned sort of way. Slim, almost girlish figure. Black linen jacket over a black T-shirt, loose black trousers. He’d been standing in front of an early self-portrait of Bella. It was Bella at her most outrageous. She was dressed in red with a scarlet gash of lipstick as a mouth, her hair blown away from her face, at once disturbing and erotic. It was an oil, the paint thick and textured, the strokes very free.

Then he moved on to stand next to Roddy Sinclair and to stare at a work of Fran’s, a drawing of Cassie on the beach at Ravenswick. Something about the intensity of his looking made her uncomfortable, though it wasn’t the sort of picture that would allow him to recognize Cassie in the street. He looked horrified, she thought, not keen. As if he’d just witnessed an atrocity. Or seen a ghost.