“Come to my office tomorrow morning at nine,” he said.

“Your mother-in-law left very precise instructions, and very little time in which to leave them.

That key opens something that your husband has been searching this house for, quite desperately, for over a year.

I think it is time you knew what it is.”

And he inclined his head, and left me standing in the emptying chapel with a card in one hand and a key in the other, and the first faint sense that Evelyn’s last word to me had not been only a goodbye.

That it had been an instruction.