‘No. So she trained up to be a nurse. A more unsuitable profession I cannot imagine – now why do people do that? Perhaps she wanted to travel. Perhaps she chose a job she knew she wouldn’t excel in – that perverse sense of humour you know, like the Italianate garden she made perched on her tea slopes – that was her bloody English exclamation mark in a long sentence of Indian grammar...

Never forget she was quite clever. So then she was posted to the Middle East. Wrapping up dying soldiers in her bandages of brittle!’ She shook her head. ‘Always did what least was expected of her…’

‘But you know the house she inherited from her father made her wealthier than her husband. She didn’t really need to leave England and look for work… But perhaps more interestingly, she never wanted to go back to England. Now there, that’s something they did have in common: escape from Blighty. Bit wouldn’t go and she wouldn’t go back!’

I have no idea why I asked the next question. It had nothing to do with the investigation, perhaps I was becoming more involved in their story – or perhaps I am more romantic than I thought – that’s what Aunty would say. ‘Did they honeymoon?’ I asked. Her eyes lit up like fireworks.

‘What a romantic question! Have you ever been in love Malcolm?’

‘Did they honeymoon?’ I repeated immediately annoyed with her (or was it myself?).

‘Alexandria. A wartime marriage, wartime honeymoon. Well people do funny things during a war… and yet…’ She trailed off.

‘And yet..?’ I asked her again.

‘And yet I don’t think she gave a hoot for the war, or any war. Napoleonic war, Crimean war, Boer war… I mean war full stop. Her essential character – whatever age she would have been born in – was to ignore conflict. To deflect conflict – bat it back. One of those people that would have absorbed any enemies - that would have turned any conquest round to her advantage. All enemies were the same to her. She wasn’t political you see. She didn’t take sides, she didn’t have borders.’

‘Did she have morals?’