Reluctantly he nodded his head. It was as if Molly still held him in her spell. He had to tell her the truth.

George was puzzled. He was certain who had killed Tom French, so what could Bernard Cranshaw have to confess?

“Why don’t you tell me all about it?” Molly’s soothing voice broke into his thoughts.

Cranshaw mumbled now. He had become quite inarticulate. Even the gestures, the fidgeting and sniffling, were those of a naughty boy.

“The day that Tom French died …?” he began.

No, George thought, swept by a sudden panic. It can’t have been him. I can’t have been wrong. Instinct and reason had led him to the same conclusion. If he was wrong, he would lose faith in his judgement, in himself.

Cranshaw finished his sentence in a rush of words:?

“The day that Mother fell down the stairs, I pushed her. I wanted her to die.”

“Tell me about it,” Molly said.

“I was up and dressed. She got up to go to the bathroom. She saw me and started talking to me. She didn’t want me to go out on the marsh. She was standing at the top of the stairs. It seemed so easy. I pushed her.”

“And you’ve been worrying about it ever since,” Molly said. Then, with a very subjective unprofessional expression of bitterness:

“I don’t suppose that your mother would let you forget it?”

“It’s been driving me mad.” He was calmer, the nerve in his forehead was still. “You will help me, won’t you? You will help me to get away from here?”

“Of course I’ll help you,” she said. “But first I want you to help us. We want to find out who killed Tom French. Can you tell us anything about that, anything at all? It would help Sally too.”

“He was killed with a telescope,” the man said suddenly and clearly. “I found it. It was covered with blood. I didn’t touch it.”

George wanted desperately to interrupt and to take over the interview, but he felt that it was only Molly who held the man’s concentration.

“Where was it?” Molly asked. “By the pool on the marsh where Tom’s body was found?”

“No, it was in the Lodge park, quite near to the hotel, under a bush. I didn’t feel like going out on to the marsh that day. I was upset. I was looking for owl pellets. That’s how I saw it.”

So it was there, George thought. I was right. That’s where it happened.

“Are you sure that you didn’t touch it?” Molly asked. “The police searched that area very carefully, and didn’t find it.”

“Well, they wouldn’t have done,” he said scornfully. “It had gone. When I went back later that morning it had gone.”

Now George found it impossible to keep quiet. Molly had been asking all the right questions, but he could not sit and watch any longer.

“Why,” he asked in as controlled and quiet a voice as he could manage, “didn’t you tell the police about this? Or you could have told me.”