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ahead when they are children and anticipate an outlay of money on their wedding celebrations. Wexford realized this and had begun saving for it out of his detective inspector’s salary, but Sylvia had married so young as almost to catch him napping. For Sheila he had been determined to be well prepared, then gradually, with wonder and a kind of dismay, he had watched her rise out of that income bracket and society in which she had grown up, graduate into a sparkling, lavish jet set whose members had wedding receptions in country mansions or else the Dorchester.
    For a long time it had looked as if she would not marry at all. Then Andrew Thorverton had appeared, a young businessman, immensely wealthy, it seemed to Wexford, with a house in Hampstead, a cottage in the country somewhere that his future father-in-law suspected was a sizeable house, a boat and an amazing car of so esoteric a manufacture that Wexford had never before heard of it. Sheila, made old-fashioned and sentimental by love, announced she would be married from home and, almost in the same breath, that she and Andrew would be paying for the entertainment of two hundred people to luncheon in the banquet room of the Olive and Dove. Yes, she insisted, it must be so and Pop must lump it or else she’d go and get married in a register office and have lunch at the Pearl of Africa.
    He was slightly humiliated. Somehow he felt she ought to cut garment according to cloth, and his cloth would cover a buffet table for fifty. That was absurd, of course. Andrew wouldn’t even notice the few thousand it would cost, and the bride’s father would give her away, make a speech and hang onto his savings. He heard her telling Andrew she would be coming up to spend the weekend with him, and then Dora walked in.
    ‘She won’t be supporting her friend at the cremation then?’
    Sheila had put the phone down. She was sometimes a little flushed and breathless when she had been talking to Andrew. But it was not now of him that she spoke. ‘Dinah’s not going to it. How could she bear it? Two days after what would have been their wedding day?’
    ‘At least it’s not the day itself,’ said Wexford.
    ‘Frankly, I’m surprised Sir Manuel’s daughter didn’t fix it on the day itself. She’s capable of it. There’s going to be a memorial service at St Peter’s on Tuesday and everyone will be there. Solti is coming and probably Menuhin. Dinah says there are sure to be crowds, he was so much loved.’
    Wexford said, ‘Does she know if he left her much?’
    Sheila delivered her reply slowly and with an actress’s perfect timing.
    ‘He has not left her anything. He has not left her a single penny.’ She sank to the floor, close up by the fire, and stretched out her long legs. ‘Her engagement ring and that dog, that’s all she’s got.’
    ‘How did that come about? Did you ask her?’
    ‘Oh, Pop darling, of course I did. Wasn’t I with her for hours and hours? I got the whole thing out of her.’
    ‘You’re as insatiably inquisitive as your father!’ cried Dora, revolted. ‘I thought you went to comfort the poor girl. I agree it’s not like losing a young fiancé, but just the same . . .’
    ‘Curiosity,’ quoted Wexford, ‘is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.’ He chuckled. ‘The daughter gets it all, does she?’
    ‘Sir Manuel saw his daughter a week before he died and that was the first time he’d seen her for nineteen years. There’d been a family quarrel. She was at the Royal Academy of Music but she left and went off with an American student. The first Camargue and his wife knew of it was a letter from San Francisco. Mrs Camargue – he wasn’t a Sir then – got ill and died but the daughter didn’t come back. She didn’t come back at all till last November. Doesn’t it seem frightfully unfair that she gets everything?’
    ‘Camargue should have made a new will.’
    ‘He was going to as soon as they