‘I want to know,’ Liddle said, ‘if you’ve been using poison on the moors. Since you’ve been here it’s been your responsibility, controlling the vermin. I’ve been a young keeper myself. I know what it’s like to put in all that work then see those bloody birds flying over the hill. It’s soul-destroying. But if you’ve been using poisoned bait up behind Back Rigg I have to know.’

He paused. Craven made no response. ‘You might as well tell me,’ Liddle said. ‘I found the buzzard. I know we’ve had our differences but that was a mean sort of trick.’

‘What was a mean trick?’ Craven said. ‘What are you accusing me of now?’

Liddle took no notice. ‘I’d like to know,’ he said, ‘how you got the thing back from Mrs Ottway.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Craven stood up and was shouting.

‘Palmer-Jones found the corpse of a buzzard in my outhouse while he was looking for poison. You’re not telling me you didn’t know it was there.’

‘No,’ Craven said. ‘I didn’t know it was there.’ He paused. ‘Why’s this Palmer-Jones so interested, anyway?’

‘Because he thinks Mrs Ottway was poisoned,’ Liddle said. ‘That’s why I’m so bloody worried and I have to know what’s been going on up there. Don’t you see? If you’ve been injecting hens’ eggs with phosdrin she might have picked one up thinking her hens had been laying away. She’d just have to fancy an omelette and she’d be dead. I don’t know the legal position but that seems to me a sort of manslaughter.’

‘Yes,’ Craven said, no longer joking. ‘There are all sorts of ways of killing a person.’

‘Well?’ Liddle demanded, his impatience returning. ‘ Will you tell me what you’ve been playing at up on the hill?’

There was a hesitation and Vic thought that for once he was going to get a straight answer. But Craven only shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘ I’ve been playing at nothing. Why should I? What do I care what happens to Marcus Grenville’s grouse? I don‘t pay him thousands of pounds for a weekend’s shooting.’

He paused again. ‘ But I’ll tell you something,’ he said. ‘ When I last saw that jar of phosdrin it was half full too.’