“Just for facts.” He turned into a main road near Hammersmith Broadway, where five roads met and the lumbering red giants of the buses loomed over the black Humber Hawk.

“Shawn’s inclined to give her her head, is he? He’s too easy with her?”

“Isn’t that a guess?” taunted Lissa.

“A deduction. His wife usually sleeps late, the maid arrives at nine, and Shawn and his son get up early, so someone gets the breakfast.”

Lissa laughed.

“They don’t have a cooked breakfast. But you’re right, David takes the easy way with Belle.”

“Has there ever been any threat to the boy?”

“I’ve not heard of one.”

“Do you know of anybody with a personal motive for wanting to hurt either of them?”

“No.”

“Mr Marino said they were rich,” Roger remarked after a pause.

“They were both rich at one time, but Belle lost her money. David has plenty for the two of them, but —” Lissa hesitated, as if seeking the right words, then went on very slowly. “I think if she still had her own money, she would take Ricky and leave David high and dry. It makes it sound as if I don’t like Belle, and that’s not so, Superintendent. But I do think David’s money holds Belle where nothing and no one else could.”

At Ealing Broadway, near the Common, where women and young children and here and there a nursemaid were sitting about or playing beneath the shade of trees, Lissa told him where to turn off for Wavertree Road. Soon they were driving along the narrow, tree-lined avenues of the housing estate. They passed countless houses which looked very much alike, the red bricked walls, the concealing hedges. Everything had the neat and tidy look that was so typically English.

From the end of Wavertree Road, Lissa directed him to the cul-de-sac, shaped like a horseshoe and with three houses in it, the Shawns’ the middle of the three. This house was brick-built, the top was timbered, and the tiles were weathered to a dark red. Window frames and doors had been recently painted, and the garden was spick and span, dahlias nodding multi-coloured heads and ragged petals in the quiet wind. In the garden of the house on the right, a grey-haired woman stood looking up at Number Thirty-one.