Cynthia wasn’t at all what Robin had expected. She now realized that her imagination had sketched in a young blonde, the stereotypical idea of a Scandinavian au pair… or was that because Sarah Shadlock had almost white hair?

“Coffee?” Strike asked Cynthia.

“Oh—coffee, yes please, wonderful, thank you,” said Cynthia, over-enthusiastically. When Strike had left, Cynthia made a small pantomime of dithering over which seat to take until Robin, smiling, pulled out the seat beside her and offered her own hand, too.

“Oh, yes, hello!” said Cynthia, sitting down and shaking hands. She had a thin, sallow face, currently wearing an anxious smile. The irises of her large eyes were heavily mottled, an indeterminate color between blue, green and gray, and her teeth were rather crooked.

“So you lead the tour in character?” asked Robin.

“Yes, exactly, as poor Anne, hahaha,” said Cynthia, with another nervous, snorting laugh. “‘I couldn’t give the King a son! They said I was a witch!’ Those are the sort of things children like to hear; I have to work quite hard to get the politics in, hahaha. Poor Anne.” Her thin hands fidgeted.

“Oh, I’m still—I can take this off, at least, hahaha!”

Cynthia set to work unpinning her headdress. Even though she could tell that Cynthia was very nervous, and that her constant laughter was more of a tic than genuine amusement, Robin was again reminded of Sarah Shadlock, who tended to laugh a lot, and loudly, especially in the vicinity of Matthew. Wittingly or not, Cynthia’s laughter imposed a sort of obligation: smile back or seem hostile. Robin remembered a documentary on monkeys she had watched one night when she was too tired to get up and go to bed: chimps, too, laughed back at each other to signal social cohesion.

When Strike returned to the table with Cynthia’s coffee, he found her newly bare-headed. Her dark hair was fifty percent gray, and smoothed back into a short, thin ponytail.

“It’s very good of you to meet us, Mrs. Phipps,” he said, sitting back down.

“Oh, no, not at all, not at all,” said Cynthia, waving her thin hands and laughing some more. “Anything I can do to help Anna with—but Roy hasn’t been well, so I don’t want to worry him just now.”

“I’m sorry to hear—”

“Yes, thank you, no, it’s prostate cancer,” said Cynthia, no longer laughing. “Radiation therapy. Not feeling too chipper. Anna and Kim came over this morning to sit with him, or I wouldn’t have been able—I don’t like leaving him at the moment, but the girls are there, so I thought I’d be fine to…”

The end of the sentence was lost as she took a sip of coffee. Her hand trembled slightly as she replaced the cup onto the saucer.

“Your stepdaughter’s probably told—” Strike began, but Cynthia immediately interrupted him.

“Daughter. I don’t ever call Anna my stepdaughter. Sorry, but I feel just the same about her as I do about Jeremy and Ellie. No difference at all.”

Robin wondered whether that was true. She was uncomfortably aware that part of her was standing aside, watching Cynthia with judgmental eyes. She isn’t Sarah, Robin reminded herself.

“Well, I’m sure Anna’s told you why she hired us, and so on.”

“Oh, yes,” said Cynthia. “No, I must admit, I’ve been expecting something like this for a while. I hope it isn’t going to make things worse for her.”

“Er—well, we hope that, too, obviously,” said Strike, and Cynthia laughed and said, “Oh, no, of course, yes.”

Strike took out his notebook, in which a few photocopied sheets were folded, and a pen.

“Could we begin with the statement you gave the police?”

“You’ve got it?” said Cynthia, looking startled. “The original?”

“A photocopy,” he said, unfolding it.

“How… funny. Seeing it again, after all this time. I was eighteen. Eighteen! It seems a century ago, hahaha!”

The signature at the bottom of the uppermost page, Robin saw, was rounded and rather childish. Strike handed the photocopied pages to Cynthia, who took them looking almost frightened.

“I’m afraid I’m awfully dyslexic,” she said. “I was forty-two before I was diagnosed. My parents thought I was bone idle, hahaha… um, so…”

“Would you rather I read it to you?” Strike suggested. Cynthia handed it back to him at once.

“Oh, thank you—this is how I learn all my guiding notes, by listening to audio disks, hahaha…”

Strike flattened out the photocopied papers on the table.

“Please interrupt if you want to add or change anything,” he told Cynthia, who nodded and said that she would.

““Name, Cynthia Jane Phipps… date of birth, July the twentieth 1957… address, ‘The Annexe, Broom House, Church Road’… that would be Margot’s—?”

“I had self-contained rooms over the double garage,” said Cynthia. Robin thought she laid slight emphasis on “self-contained.”

“‘I am employed as nanny to Dr. Phipps and Dr. Bamborough’s infant daughter, and I live in their house—’”

“Self-contained studio,” said Cynthia. “It had its own entrance.”

“‘My hours…’ Don’t think we need any of that,” muttered Strike. “Here we go. ‘On the morning of the eleventh of October I began work at 7 a.m. I saw Dr. Bamborough before she left for work. She seemed entirely as usual. She reminded me that she would be late home because she was meeting her friend Miss Oonagh Kennedy for drinks near her place of work. As Dr. Phipps was bedbound due to his recent accident—’”

“Anna told you about Roy’s von Willebrand Disease?” said Cynthia anxiously.

“Er—I don’t think she told us, but it’s mentioned in the police report.”

“Oh, didn’t she say?” said Cynthia, who seemed unhappy to hear it. “Well, he’s a Type Three. That’s serious, as bad as hemophilia. His knee swelled up and he was in a lot of pain, could hardly move,” said Cynthia.

“Yes,” said Strike, “it’s all in the police—”

“No, because he’d had an accident on the seventh,” said Cynthia, who seemed determined to say this. “It was a wet day, pouring with rain, you can check that. He was walking around a corner of the hospital, heading for the car park, and an out-patient rode right into him on a pushbike. Roy got tangled up in the front wheel, slipped, hit his knee and had a major bleed. These days he has prophylactic injections so it doesn’t happen the way it used to, but back then, if he injured himself, it could lay him up for weeks.”

“Right,” said Strike, and judging it to be the most tactful thing to do, he made careful note of all these details, which he’d already read in Roy’s own statements and police interviews.

“No, Anna knows her dad was ill that day. She’s always known,” Cynthia added.

Strike continued reading the statement aloud. It was a retelling of facts Strike and Robin already knew. Cynthia had been in charge of baby Anna at home. Roy’s mother had come over during the day. Wilma Bayliss had cleaned for three hours and left. Cynthia had taken occasional cups of tea to the invalid and his mother. At 6 p.m., Evelyn Phipps had gone home to her bungalow to play bridge with friends, leaving a tray of food for her son.