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shortly, as if to get that out of the way. ‘What do you want?’
    ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news. Would you come inside? It would be better to tell you and your wife together.’
    He looked angry. ‘Is it Zellah? If there’s trouble, it will be Sophy and those other girls. Zellah would never do anything wrong. She’s a top student, all A grades; she plays the piano and flute, she’s going to university. She’s a good girl. If they’ve done something it’s those others who thought it up. I said she was too young to be staying over, but her mother insisted. Nobody brings their children up properly any more. They let them run wild. What have they got her into?’
    He folded his arms and stood immovably in the doorway of his shed, and obviously was not going to stir until Atherton told him. Perhaps, after all, it was better to tell him first, away from his wife – let him take it to her.
    ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to brace yourself for a shock,’ he said. ‘Something very bad indeed has happened.’
    Wilding’s eyes widened and Atherton saw his nostrils flare. It was an animal’s reaction to threat; but no parent could ever be prepared for this.
    He hated this bit. But there was no way to say it but to say it. ‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. Zellah is dead.’
    The big, handsome face seemed to shrink together. The eyes were appalled. ‘No,’ he said faintly. ‘No she’s not. She’s not. She’s not.’
    But he knew it. The truth was in those staring, naked eyes.
    Connolly had made tea, and Mrs Wilding sipped it, more out of automatic social response, Atherton guessed, than because she wanted it. Mr Wilding didn’t seem to know his was there. He stared silently into an abyss before him. Mrs Wilding did the talking.
    ‘Sophy Cooper-Hutchinson.’ She supplied the name of the girl Zellah had been visiting, and even at such a moment there was a hint of pride in it. ‘They have a big house in Netheravon Lane – do you know it?’
    Atherton nodded. It was not that far, in fact, from where Slider lived in Turnham Green. It was a small area of very large, mainly Georgian houses close to the river on the border of Hammersmith and Chiswick. It was where rich Londoners in the eighteenth century had gone to get out of town in the summer, the forerunner of the seaside holiday. If the Cooper-Hutchinsons had a big house there – as opposed to a flat in part of a big house – they must be well off.
    ‘Sophy and Zellah are friends at school. Sophy’s a few months older than her, and she’s got an older sister, Abigail, who’s eighteen – she’s going to Oxford next month, but she’s still at home now – so although the parents are away for the week, we thought it would be all right for them to be in the house on their own. Sophy’s quite a sensible girl really, and they weren’t going to have a party or anything – Daddy and I made it quite clear there wasn’t to be anything like that. They just wanted to be together the way girls do, and you can’t wrap them up in cotton wool, can you? I mean, Zellah’s nearly seventeen, you have to start treating them like grown-ups some time, and it would have made it very awkward for her with her friends if we’d said she couldn’t go when she’d been invited specially. I want her to have friends, the right sort of friends. It’s bad enough us living here—’
    Wilding lifted his head at that moment and Mrs Wilding met his look and stopped abruptly, obedient, but with a touch of defiance in her expression. She went on, ‘The Cooper-Hutchinsons are the kind of people I want Zellah to mix with, not people from round here. I want her to get on, and I wasn’t going to embarrass her in front of them and have them laugh at her behind her back because her parents were so out of touch they wouldn’t let her come and stay for a simple . . . innocent . . . sleepover . . .’
    Shaky breaths that were trying to be sobs broke up the end of