She would reveal herself in a moment—only a moment—after all, it was delicious to play with this sweet duplicity.
"Have you?" she said in a tremulous voice.
His head was down. "Dead!" he answered, and the tool dropped out of her hand on to the floor.
"I was five years in America after the police expelled me from London, and when I returned to England I went back to the little shop in Soho."
She was staring at him and holding her breath. He was looking out of the window.
"The same people were there, and their own daughter was a grown-up girl, but Roma was gone."
She could hear the breath in her nostrils.
"They told me she had been missing for a week, and then ... her body had been found in the river."
She felt like one struck dumb.
"The man took me to the grave. It was the grave of her mother in Kensal Green, and under her mother's name I read her own inscription—'Sacred also to the memory of Roma Roselli, found drowned in the Thames, aged twelve years.'"