Ivy Trelawney

Ivy Trelawney is 29 and has spent three of those years as Leonora Vesey's secretary and typist. Born in Truro, Cornwall, the daughter of a grocer, she came to London at 20 and worked in an insurance office, where she typed policies without reading any. It was Leonora who took her out of there and gave her a place in the household. Ivy says she owes her everything and talks about it with moist eyes.

She lives in a rented room in the attic of a Sunningdale boarding house, under the sloping roof, with an iron bed, a little sewing table, a washstand with a porcelain pitcher and a round window onto the pines. The landlady, a vicar's widow, brings tea on Fridays. Ivy keeps the letters from Truro in a biscuit tin, which she rereads on Sundays. She learned to speak softly so as not to disturb the floor.

She is short and thin, with a pale, freckled face, frightened light eyes and short wavy red hair. She wears a navy wool dress with a white collar, a gray cardigan, thick stockings and reading glasses hanging on a chain. She always carries a shorthand pad in her hands. Discreet, loyal, she speaks softly and clings to details, like the color of the ink or the day the newspaper arrived.

She types Leonora's novels, answers readers' letters and looks after the seven-year-old girl when her employer writes. About her last weeks, she says she slept little, forgot the names of things and cried for her mother, who died in April. But she wrote every day, and someone who writes every day, says Ivy, doesn't think of quarries. When the detective insists she is hiding something, she answers that she hides nothing from the police and asks to be spoken to properly.

It could be the frightened loyalty of a girl alone, who lost the only person she trusted. It could be the fright of someone keeping something she doesn't know how to tell. The detective will have to decide which.