Beatrice, she had decided, looked like some rich man’s wife, spoilt, affected, annoyingly child-like, and yes, a little cracked, the result no doubt of long years spent in a wheelchair, but there was no evidence of a Mr Ardleigh – none of her rings was a wedding one. Ingrid too was peculiar, even a bit creepy, with her garb of woe, black gloves that brought to mind Victorian undertakers, and mother-hen solicitousness, yet, it was not taken separately, but collectively, as an ensemble piece, in relation to one another, that the two women became really interesting. They appealed to her sense of anomaly. They stimulated her Gothic imagination. (For some time Antonia had wanted to write a detective story with Gothic overtones.) Some kind of strange symbiosis seemed to have been at work. Les bonnes, or the maids – as Antonia whimsically dubbed them in her mind – couldn’t have been more different, yet there was an odd likeness between them – it was something subtle, elusive, indefinable – blink and it was gone. That was what happened when two people had lived together a long time. Antonia had observed the phenomenon with husbands and wives.

What was the nature of their relationship? Ingrid was more than a mere carer, of that Antonia was certain, but she didn’t think they were a ‘couple’, not in the Sapphic sense of the word. Somehow one could always tell if people were lovers. Ingrid was treating Beatrice as though she were her daughter – her little girl. Yes. That was where the oddity came from. The glances Ingrid cast upon Beatrice were a blend of intense devotion and concern. She had kept her hand on Beatrice’s shoulder. It was a possessive kind of gesture, but it also looked like a restraining one.

Antonia indulged in some lurid hypotheses. The two women shared a dark secret. They had committed murder together – in the manner perhaps of Genet’s Les Bonnes? They had killed Beatrice’s rich old aunt or rich old uncle.