‘No, Inspector,’ George said. ‘That’s impossible.’ He took a clear plastic bag from a shelf on the dresser and showed Benwell the handkerchief and fragments of shell inside. ‘She must have found these on the hill at the same time as the buzzard,’ he said. ‘They were in her coat pocket. She recognised their significance enough to collect them. If she’d found an intact egg out there do you really think she would have eaten it?’

‘No,’ Benwell said. ‘I didn’t realise.’ Then, defensively: ‘You do see why I had to ask?’

‘What else do you have to ask, Inspector?’ Molly said brutally. ‘You want to know, I suppose, whether she might have committed suicide?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have to ask that too. She was depressed. She’d been drinking heavily. I have to look into the possibility.’

‘No,’ Molly said. ‘Ursula didn’t kill herself. She wouldn’t have done. Not like this. Not in the middle of a fight with Grenville. She was never one for giving up. Besides, how could she have done? It’s possible, I suppose, that she took a bottle of poison from the outhouse at Keeper’s Cottage when she was there late on Friday night, but unthinkable, don’t you think, that she put it back later and then returned here to die?’

‘Yes,’ Benwell said. ‘You’re quite right. That’s impossible.’ He looked at them, calm and serious. ‘So,’ he said. ‘It’s murder.’

Molly had expected that then the policeman would leave, that the impersonal ritual of a police investigation would begin and that they would have no further part to play in the affair. She had expected that she would have to deal with George’s sense of frustration and helplessness as he watched the inquiry develop without him. But the policeman remained where he was at Ursula’s table. It seemed that he was in no hurry to return to his family, that he had, in fact, all the time in the world. He accepted her offer of tea and when at last he began to speak it became clear that this was a council of war and that although the laborious business of police investigation would proceed elsewhere they were in no way to be excluded. George‘s lethargy and bad temper left him. He passed on, in a logical, methodical way, so that he might almost be reading from a previously prepared paper, all the information they had gained.

He told Benwell that Ursula was a rich woman, that Grenville was frightened of Danny Craven, and about the anonymous phone call to the local newspaper. Then they decided between them a strategy for action, a plan of campaign. When Benwell finally left Back Rigg it was gone midnight and the rain had returned.