“Oh, yes, when she’s able,” replied Drewson. His eyebrows lifted as if noticing the disarray for the first time. “Mrs. Whittlesby doesn’t like anyone in her room whilst she’s sleeping—which is quite often,” he added in a disapproving tone. “Or when she’s in her sitting room, typing her letters. She says Louella makes too much noise for her head. Not a surprise.”

A vase of roses sat on Mrs. Whittlesby’s bedside table, and there was another on the desk in her connecting sitting room, which seemed to serve as a sort of office. One wall in the office contained bookshelves, and Phyllida noted an extensive collection of murder novels, as well as other books on gardening, fashion, cooking, and sewing.

A typewriter sat on the desk, and there was a sheaf of stationery in a tray next to it. An ink pen, pencils, scissors, and an eraser were organized in another small tray.

Phyllida automatically tried to open the main desk drawer, but to her surprise it was locked.

“What does she keep in here?” she asked Drewson, opening another drawer to find plain typing paper. In another, there was an extra pair of gloves, a nail cutter, and a tube of lip color.

“Her correspondence,” he replied, seemingly unconcerned by the locked drawer.

Phyllida frowned. What sort of correspondence needed to be kept under lock and key? If she were alone, she would open the drawer to find out. But of course she couldn’t with the butler hovering. There was no need to advertise her lock-picking skills.

After finishing in Mrs. Whittlesby’s rooms, Phyllida went into Mr. Alastair Whittlesby’s bedroom. She discovered it was only marginally less disorganized than his wife’s. Presumably, in the absence of a valet, Drewson attended to his master’s clothing, shoes, and toilette, and therefore was responsible for keeping the room tidy.

Phyllida made a firm mental note to never consider employing any member of the staff currently at Tangled Vines Cottage.

Mr. Whittlesby’s office, which was a mirror image of his wife’s, turned out to be where he wrote his detective stories. A typewriter sat in the middle of a large, imposing desk. There were crumpled papers in the waste can, which Phyllida pulled out. They were, as she expected, pages from an Inspector Belfast story, and some apostrophe and grammar corrections, as well as plot notations, were marked with a pencil.

Next to the typewriter was a stack of plain paper, and on its other side was a stack of typewritten pages, turned upside down with the first page on the bottom. Phyllida picked up the stack despite Drewson’s sharp intake of breath.

“The staff don’t touch his papers,” said the butler.