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every bit as forthright as her sister.
    â€˜Her first.’
    â€˜Did they have any children? I mean, has Daddy got stepbrothers and sisters that we don’t know about?’ She pulled her face down in a grimace. ‘The parents won’t ever talk about granny’s past.’
    â€˜Quite, quite,’ coughed the Brigadier. ‘No, she and Donald Tulloch didn’t have any children. No time. Not then. There was a war on, you see.’
    â€˜And her second husband?’
    The Brigadier plunged his face into his wine glass and mumbled, ‘Never mentioned.’
    â€˜How romantic.’
    â€˜Probably not,’ said the old soldier.
    â€˜Any children that time round?’
    â€˜She never said. Not one to talk, Gertie,’ said Hamish MacIver. In fact, Gertie had always been famously discreet in some matters as well as at one and the same time being famously indiscreet about others, but he saw no reason to tell her granddaughter this.
    Amanda sighed. ‘Then there was Tertius, I suppose.’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Her third husband. Tertius means third,’ she explained kindly. ‘Latin and all that. My grandfather.’
    â€˜Ah, yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Hubert Powell.’
    â€˜And they had poor old dull Daddy…’
    The Brigadier assented to this with a little bow but without comment.
    â€˜How unromantic,’ said Amanda.
    Privately the Brigadier agreed with her. There was precious little of Gertie in her son Lionel. ‘We don’t choose our parents, m’dear. Just have to make the best of those we get.’
    â€˜It’s not easy,’ said Amanda frankly, looking towards the window, where her own father and mother were standing as much apart from the residents as they decently could. The Reverend Adrian Brailsford, noting their isolation and at the same time seeing an opportunity of shaking off Mrs Morag McBeath, had set off in their direction.
    â€˜No,’ agreed the Brigadier.
    â€˜And what happens now?’ asked Amanda with all the impatience of youth.
    The Brigadier said he was blessed if he really knew. ‘I expect,’ he murmured without thinking, ‘they’ll just keep everything on ice for a bit.’
    â€˜I bet Daddy loses his cool, though,’ forecast Amanda, not sounding at all daunted at the prospect.
    *   *   *
    â€˜Taking their time, aren’t they?’ complained Hazel Finch in the kitchen. She’d finished her ham and was sitting back in her chair, looking round expectantly.
    â€˜You wait until you’re the Judge’s age, my girl,’ said Lisa Haines warmly, ‘and you won’t be bolting your food either.’ She turned to Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Ninety, he is and all his own teeth still.’
    Detective Inspector Sloan, who had long since ceased to marvel at anything – anything at all – in the human condition save man’s inhumanity to man, duly expressed wonderment.
    â€˜He’s always slow,’ said the cook, ‘and that Miss Bentley will talk and not eat.’
    â€˜How come a judge gets to come here?’ asked Sloan. ‘Was he in the Fearnshires, too?’ Privately he resolved to have a quiet word with Judge whoever he was and find out if he had kept all his marbles as well as his teeth.
    â€˜He was an army judge,’ said the cook, disappearing into the larder and emerging with two large bowls of chocolate mousse. She set them down on the sideboard and went back for two decorated trifles. ‘There, I’m ready when they are.’
    Hazel Finch followed the progress of the desserts across the room with her eyes like a hungry child. ‘Look lovely, don’t they?’
    â€˜The first bite is with the eye,’ said the cook knowledgeably. ‘There’s a tarte aux pommes as well but if I know anything they won’t touch it.’
    Detective Inspector Sloan, always ready to enlarge