“Hackett.”

“Yes, yes, sorry, Inspector Hackett. You must understand, my husband and I, we live… separately.”

“You were separated?”

“No, no.” She smiled. “Even still, sometimes, my English… I mean, we have our own lives. It is-it was-that kind of marriage.” She smiled again. “I think perhaps I have shocked you, a little, yes?”

“No, ma’am, not at all. I’m just trying to understand the circumstances. Your husband was a very prominent person. There’ll be a lot of stuff about this in the papers, a lot of speculation. It’s all very… delicate, shall we say.”

“You mean, there will be a scandal.”

“I mean, people will want to know. People will want reasons.”

“People?” she said scathingly, showing for the first time a spark of passion, a spark, and no more. “What business is it of people? My husband is dead, my daughter’s father. That is a scandal, yes, but for me and for my family and for no one else.”

“Yes,” Hackett said mildly, nodding. “That’s true. But curiosity is a great itch, Mrs. Jewell. I’d recommend you keep the phone off the hook for a day or two. Have you friends you could stay with, that would put you up?”

She leaned her head far back and looked at him down the length of her narrow fine-boned nose. “Do I seem to you, Inspector,” she asked icily, “the kind of person who would go into hiding? I know about people, about their itch. I know about interrogations. I am not afraid.”

There was a brief silence.

“I’m sure you’re not, Mrs. Jewell,” Hackett said. “I’m sure you’re not.”

Jenkins in the background was gazing at the woman with admiring fascination. Maguire, still lost in himself, heaved a great sigh. Mrs. Jewell’s anger, if it was that, subsided, and she turned her face away. In profile she had the look of a figure on a pharaoh’s tomb. Then they heard the sound of another car squeaking its way onto the cobbles of the yard.