I had seen Charles le Mesurier trying to impose himself on her not once but twice. And although she had tried to pretend otherwise, she had been seriously upset when I spoke to her in the kitchen on the night of the party. As its name implied, the Snuggery had been used by le Mesurier as his own den of vice, and his behaviour – tiptoeing there in the darkness, the cocaine use – suggested a sexual assignation. Suppose Kathryn had pretended to accept his offer and had tied him down as some sort of bondage thing? That made sense. She could have killed him and then taken the watch: it would be a year’s salary for her. It was true that she looked too ordinary, too vulnerable to be a psychopathic killer, but then, from what I’d read, most psychopathic killers are just like that. It’s why they’re so hard to catch.

Marc Bellamy.

Her boss struck me, frankly, as too much of a buffoon to be a murderer, but then everything about him – his clothes, his catchphrases – was a construct, a television persona. Who could say what it might conceal? He and Charles le Mesurier had gone to the same school – Westland College – at the same time and he hadn’t enjoyed it. If there was one thing that my own experience had taught me it was that the private-education system could create grievances that would stay with you for a lifetime. Good old Flash had been taunting Tea Leaf from the moment the two of them had set eyes on each other at The Divers Inn. Who could say that le Mesurier hadn’t accidentally triggered some childhood psychosis, with lethal results?

I would have dismissed Elizabeth Lovell immediately, but my long experience in the world of murder mystery – what I had written and what I had read – had taught me that the killer was often the most unlikely suspect, which actually propelled her, along with Anne Cleary, to the top of the list. There was no love lost between the two of them, but for the moment they shared a page.

Elizabeth was blind. Even with Sid’s help she would have found it hard to stab le Mesurier, particularly with such surgical precision. Could Sid have tied him down to allow her to strike the final blow, helping her to get revenge for something that we didn’t yet know about? It was a neat idea and one that would have looked good in a television dramatisation, but even as I wrote it down it seemed extremely unlikely. First of all there was no motive . . . not unless le Mesurier knew something about the couple that nobody else did. But secondly, there was a question of timing. I had seen Elizabeth in the garden, on her own, not that long before the murder had taken place. Would she have sat there smoking a cigarette if she was about to take part in a killing?