She was my executive assistant from 2009.

She was sixty-three that year.

She had been to my father’s funeral and she sent my mother a card at Christmas and she knew my shoe size for a reason I have never established.

In the June of that year, Eleanor Vance took Bernadette to lunch.

She told her that there was a former contractor of the foundation, a woman named Evelyn Tarrant, who had become fixated on me during a difficult period; that she had been making allegations; that the family’s counsel was dealing with it; that letters would come, that they were distressing, and that I was not to be shown them because it would set me back.

And she asked Bernadette to mark them and put them back in the post, and to forward anything else to Russell Tannehill’s office, and not to raise it with me.