Joseph bowed his head.

‘The police must be notified at once.’

‘It has already been done. They should be here any minute now.’

‘I will wait for them.’

‘It has been such a ghastly shock!’ Joseph said, after an uncomfortable pause.

The doctor assented. He looked as though he too had suffered a shock.

‘I suppose you don’t know who – ?’ he asked, leaving the sentence unfinished.

Joseph shook his head. ‘I almost feel I’d rather not know. If one could be sure he didn’t suffer!’

‘Oh, probably hardly at all!’ Stoke said reassuringly.

‘Thank you. It’s a relief to know that. I suppose he must have died immediately.’

‘Well, within a very short time, anyway,’ conceded Stoke.

Joseph sighed, and relapsed into silence. This lasted until the arrival of a police inspector, with various satellites. Stephen brought them upstairs, and Joseph roused himself from his abstraction, greeting the Inspector, whom he knew, with a forced smile, and saying: ‘You know Dr Stoke, don’t you?’

The room seemed suddenly to be overfull of people. Joseph confided to Stephen that it seemed a desecration. The police-surgeon and Dr Stoke conferred together over Nathaniel’s body, and the Inspector, who looked as though he did not like being brought to a murder-case on Christmas Eve, began to ask questions.

‘I can’t tell you anything,’ Stephen said. ‘The last time I saw him alive was downstairs in the drawing-room, at about seven-thirty.’

‘I understand it was you who broke into the room, sir, and discovered the body?’

‘His valet and I. Our finger-prints will be found all over the place.’

‘Mine too,’ Joseph said unhappily. ‘One doesn’t think, when a thing like this happens.’

The Inspector’s eyes dwelled on the brandy decanter, and the glass beside it. Stephen said: ‘No. False scent. The brandy was brought to revive my uncle before we realised he was dead. I drank it.’

‘Very understandable, sir, I’m sure. When you came in, was the deceased lying as at present?’

‘Not quite,’ Stephen said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘He was rather more on his face, I think.’

‘I wonder if you would be so good, sir, as to replace the body as you found it?’

Stephen hesitated, distaste in his face. Joseph said pleadingly: ‘Inspector, this is terribly painful for my nephew! Surely –’

‘Shut up!’ Stephen said roughly, and went to Nathaniel’s body, and arranged it. ‘More or less like that.’

‘Do you agree with that, sir?’ the Inspector asked Joseph.

‘Yes, yes!’ Joseph said. ‘His head was on his arm. We never dreamed – we thought he had fainted!’

The Inspector nodded, and asked who slept in the next bedroom, which lay beyond Nathaniel’s bathroom. He was told that it was a single spare-room which Roydon had been put into, and took a note of this. Having scrutinised the windows, both in the bedroom and in the bathroom, and looked meditatively at the half-open ventilator, he ascertained that these had not been tampered with since the finding of Nathaniel’s body, and at last suggested that further questions might best be answered in some other room.