At first Craven felt faint with relief. That was it, then. All his anxiety was over. He had been a fool to think he would be found out. Then he considered the matter more carefully, his mind racing. Why had he been excluded from the interviews? He was a keeper. It was his specific responsibility to deal with the vermin on the hill. He had known about the poison in Vic Liddle’s shed. The fact that the policeman had ignored him was suddenly sinister.

‘Didn’t the inspector want to see me?’ he insisted. Perhaps there had been a breakdown in communication. Perhaps the summons had been issued but not received.

Liddle looked up. His head was full of plans for the next day. He was irritated by the interruption.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘ if he’d wanted to see you he’d have asked for you. He had a list of everyone on the estate.’

‘Oh well,’ Craven said lamely. ‘I suppose that’s all right, then.’ But he remained unconvinced and all day he waited for the policeman to return.

Olivia Grenville stood in the large kitchen at the back of the Cadver. It was a gloomy, poorly lit room with huge larders and little in the way of modern convenience. Her housekeeper had taken a day’s holiday and the daily woman who usually covered for her had been struck by some mysterious illness. All these facts conspired to add to Olivia’s unease. She felt, as she had done when the valley was flooded to make the reservoir, that the world was disintegrating around her. It was not her place to be in the kitchen. Neither should she have to suffer the indignity of having her husband’s photograph in the tabloid newspapers and a gang of reporters camping out by the main gate. She would not tolerate it. Marcus must be forced to sort it out. The morality of the situation did not concern her in the least. She had always known that appearances were what mattered.

She began, reluctantly, to prepare a simple lunch for the family. As she shredded lettuce into a colander she thought dispassionately that life would be so much easier if Marcus was dead.

Jeremy Grenville had been the first person summoned to give a statement to Inspector Benwell. In many ways the interview had been easier than he had expected. Waiting outside the estate office, trying to compose himself, he imagined himself in school again, having committed some unexplained misdemeanour. But the policeman had been far more human than the headmaster, far more reasonable. He had ignored Jeremy’s stutter, waiting patiently for his answers. So eventually Jeremy had relaxed and had begun to speak quite fluently.

‘On Friday night Miss Theobald took you as far as the dam, then you walked home,’ Benwell said.