When she first moved to Brighton, the flat on the Lawns had felt luxurious and it had seemed as if she was settling down, sleeping in the same bed every night, the darkness uninterrupted by any hint of emergency. It had felt as if all her difficulties were over.

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.

The world is changing and you’re only just becoming accustomed to it. You’re changing, I suppose. You’ve changed since I’ve known you.’‘How?’‘You’ve come more alive.

Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.

Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.

A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.

If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
That’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water.