well don’t you think? She was hot. Seen any photographs?’

I pulled the only one I had out from the file. It had been taken on holiday somewhere in India, her hand resting on a temple stone, her face inscrutable. I thought she looked like one of those androgynous film stars, her long body in modern white pants and a dark top, strangely sexual but asexual as well, a complex built around the image.

Aunty studied it. ‘Not your type Malcolm? You won’t be pinning it up in your police digs?’

‘I don’t think you can tell much from a photograph.’ But it sounded pompous to my own ears.

‘Ha, you wish! Look at her hands. Tell me if she took them away, would the whole temple collapse, hmm?’ I didn’t reply though I could see what she was getting at for Agatha held that photo together. ‘Agatha kept her own counsel; she was very close, private. That way she had of deflection, of batting back anything that was given to her in seriousness… You know I remember when I first saw her, when she first came up to the gardens – she was very fresh. Not fresh like a virgin, I’m quite sure she wasn’t that, but India you know, she’d

never been… She was a foreigner here among the Britishers. She wasn’t adept at Raj-ing it. India itself she had no problem with, it being what we like to call an intellectual country. She was quite mental you know, not like her husband. He was all emotion.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ I countered. ‘Everything I’ve read about her says she was unreasonable, irrational. She was a woman after all…’

‘Please Malcolm, come along now. I expect better from you. You have heard the story of she came here, and how they met?’

‘The file says they met in the Middle East…’

‘She wanted to be a dancer – but apparently she was rejected, they told her she danced with her head, not her heart. An insult, though an interesting one. Then she was on course for university when her father died one winter, slipped on ice and hit his head. European winters, I do not miss them. That made her an orphan – her mother had died when she was a child. She was at university when the war came – what should she do? Can you see her being a land girl?’

‘No.’