‘I’ve told you, mate. This is all about gambling. So what they did at the very end was give Charles le Mesurier a taste of his own medicine. Think about it! He’s tied to a chair. His head’s been cracked open. He’s frightened and in pain and worse than that, he’s got two loony women facing him and one of them has got the paperknife that she’s nicked from his study. Kathryn could have done that any time during the day. But they want the punishment to fit the crime, so they give him one chance. Just like William Cleary, they’re going to let him gamble for his life.’

Suddenly I saw it. ‘Heads or tails,’ I said.

‘They’d nicked a coin from Maïssa’s handbag in the hall. It’s got a tree on one side and a map of Europe on the other, so it’s not exactly heads or tails, but it makes sense to use a foreign coin, one that can’t be connected to them, and they also wipe it clean to make sure it didn’t have their fingerprints.’ For the first time in a while, he looked at Anne. ‘Am I right?’

‘I wanted him to know what it felt like . . . to gamble for his life,’ Anne said. ‘I left his hand free so that he could toss the coin. I told him to call and that if he got it right, I would let him go.’

‘And would you have?’

‘Of course not. But it didn’t matter anyway. He couldn’t do it.’

Right then, I saw the whole dreadful scene. Charles le Mesurier, tied to the chair, sitting in his Snuggery, still half stunned from the blow he had received. Kathryn with the knife at his throat. Anne balancing the two-euro coin on his thumb, forcing him to toss it and call. Screaming at him: ‘Heads or tails? Heads or tails?’ Terrified. But Charles finally doing what he was told, trying to get the coin to spin, hoping to save his own life.

‘He dropped it,’ Anne said. ‘He tried to toss the coin but it fell onto the carpet and we couldn’t find it.’

‘And then you killed him.’

‘Yes, Mr Hawthorne. I killed him. Not Kathryn. She had left by then.’

‘We’ll get back to that later, shall we?’ Hawthorne continued his explanation. ‘It was Helen’s turn next. Luck was still with you because Helen had seen Derek Abbott out of the bedroom window and arranged to meet him. You’d never have been able to get back into the house with all the police around, but you decided to watch the house in the hope that she’d step out for a breath of fresh air. When she set off for Quesnard Cottage, you followed her.’

‘How did they get her into the cave?’ I asked.

‘That’s a good question,’ Hawthorne said.