“What evidence do you have to hold him?” Phyllida fired back. “A cake? A pot of jam?” She scoffed and speared the inspector with her most severe expression. “I’d be quite surprised if you didn’t have a pot of strawberry jam in your kitchen. And no one would believe that Mr. Billdop baked himself a cake so he could add poison to it. The very idea is absurd. That man hasn’t the first idea about turning on a stove, let alone baking anything. And everyone has arsenic for rats.”

The detective seemed a bit taken aback by her ferocity, but he did stand his ground. “Oi now, Mrs. Bright, I realize you fancy yourself a crime-solver, but you ain’t got all of the information. Turns out the arsenic was in the strawberry jam on top of the cake, and in the frosting on the sides—looked like sugar crystals—so anyone could have spread it on there. They didn’t have to bake the cake themselves.”

This bit of fascinating information silenced Phyllida for the mere breath of a second before she regrouped and went on. “That is correct. Anyone could have done so. Have you determined from whence the cake at Father Tooley’s had come?”

“Not yet,” he admitted. “But—”

Before he could go on, she parried and thrust once more. “Inspector Cork, Mr. Billdop is a man of the cloth. He is meant to save souls, not to release them. If word of his arrest—which I must add has the flimsiest of evidence behind it—gets to his flock, it will ruin him as their vicar. Not to mention that the bishop will likely remove him, and then what will happen to the people at St. Thurston’s without their good shepherd?” She knew she was laying it on a bit thick—and the soft jeering sound from Bradford supported this belief—but the hesitancy was growing in Inspector Cork’s eyes, and she wasn’t about to stand down. “Perhaps you acted a bit hastily and only needed to question Mr. Billdop about what he might have seen and heard relative to the events of yesterday, hmm?”

She kept her eyes pinned on him until, like every little boy of her acquaintance (and a significant number of grown ones), he squirmed under her unrelenting stare. She continued to advance. “If you release him now, there will be no harm done, Inspector. His reputation will be protected—and if it does unfold that Mr. Billdop is a murderous thug,” she said, “I shan’t stand in your way.”

“Right, right, all right then, Mrs. Bright,” Inspector Cork said. “I suppose you’ve got a point there—but he was acting suspiciously, and everyone wanted the culprit to be caught so the bloody—er—ahem—so the, erm, Murder Fête could go on. Now we still got a murderer going on about, and everyone’s gonna be all nervous about it.”