‘No,’ Jeremy said. ‘I don’t think so. She’s never had a very high opinion of me.’

‘All the same,’ Simon insisted. ‘ I think you should have a go. I’ll go and talk to her, see if I can persuade her to come in to dinner.’

He was halfway through the back door when there was a sharp knock at the front door. Jeremy walked from the kitchen into the hall and shouted up that he would go.

‘It’ll be a visitor wanting to know about the pottery,’ Simon said. ‘It’s a bloody nuisance. Tell them it’s not open until Easter.’

But when Jeremy opened the door he found a little elderly lady with cropped hair and schoolboy glasses who said that although she was sure the pottery was fascinating that was not why she was there. She told him that she was Ursula Ottway’s niece and waited, blinking, on the door step to be let in.

Chapter Eight

When George returned to Back Rigg from Keeper’s Cottage he spent some time on the telephone. During his time as a senior civil servant in the Home Office he had made a useful list of contacts. He had been respected in his work for his fairness and his integrity and he still had many friends in the criminal justice field.

The first person he spoke to was Jane Mason, consultant pathologist at a Yorkshire teaching hospital. She had given evidence to a committee he had chaired on the procedures following serious crime, then he had discovered that she was a keen birdwatcher and had bumped into her several times in Norfolk and on the Scilly Isles. She was a large, jolly woman, a spinster, something of a laughing-stock in ornithological circles for claiming a number of dubious records. She was what more competent birders called a ‘stringer’. George put her claims down not to a deliberate attempt to deceive but to an over-optimistic attitude in the field – if she had not seen a bird clearly enough to make a positive identification she would persuade herself that it was the rarest of the range of possibilities. She was very proud of her friendship with George. He was well thought of, famous in the conservation world, and contact with him gave her a certain credibility.

She answered her telephone immediately and was delighted to hear from him.

‘George! My dear boy! How can I help you?’ She was younger than he was but she spoke to him as if he were a favourite nephew.

‘Phosdrin poisoning,’ he said. ‘ Have you ever come across it?’

‘Not professionally,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of it, of course. There was a documentary on the telly about a year ago. It’s what keepers put down to kill off birds of prey.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But would it be capable of killing a person?’