‘I suppose so.’

‘Your brother-in-law didn’t know?’

‘Good God, no. Axel would have killed her!’ He realized what he had said. ‘Maybe that’s why. Maybe he found out.’

‘I don’t think so, Mr Hood. Now I imagine that in the first few months of her marriage she made an effort to give up drinking. She needed a good deal of support during this time but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell Mr Kingman why she needed it. Her efforts failed, and slowly, because she couldn’t manage without it, she began drinking again.’

‘She wasn’t as bad as she used to be,’ Hood said with pathetic eagerness. ‘And only in the evenings. She told me she never had a drink before six, and after that she’d have a few more, gulping them down on the quiet so Axel wouldn’t know.’

Burden said suddenly, ‘Had your sister been drinking that evening?’

‘I expect so. She wouldn’t have been able to face company, not even just Corinne and me, without a drink.’

‘Did anyone besides yourself know that your sister drank?’

‘My mother did. My mother and I had a sort of pact to keep it dark from everyone so that Axel wouldn’t find out.’ He hesitated and then said rather defiantly, ‘I did tell Corinne. She’s a wonderful person, she’s very clever. I was worried about it and I didn’t know what to do. She promised she wouldn’t tell Axel.’

‘I see.’ Wexford had his own reasons for thinking she hadn’t done so. Deep in thought, he got up and walked to the other end of the room where he stood gazing out of the window. Burden’s continuing questions, Hood’s answers, reached him only as a confused murmur of voices. Then he heard Burden say more loudly, ‘That’s all for now, Mr Hood, unless the chief inspector has anything more to ask you.’

‘No, no,’ said Wexford abstractedly, and when Hood had somewhat truculently departed, ‘Time for lunch. It’s past two. Personally, I shall avoid any dish containing fungi, even psalliota campestris.’

After Burden had looked that one up and identified it as the common mushroom, they lunched and then made a round of such wineshops in Kingsmarkham as were open at that hour. At the Wine Basket they drew a blank, but the assistant in the Vineyard told them that a woman answering Hannah Kingman’s description had been a regular customer, and that on the previous Wednesday, the day before her death, she had called in and bought a bottle of Courvoisier Cognac.

‘There was no liquor of any kind in Kingman’s flat,’ said Burden. ‘Might have been an empty bottle in the rubbish, I suppose.’ He made a rueful face. ‘We didn’t look, didn’t think we had any reason to. But she couldn’t have drunk a whole bottleful on the Wednesday, could she?’

‘Why are you so interested in this drinking business, Mike? You don’t seriously see it as a motive for murder, do you? That Kingman killed her because he’d found out, or been told, that she was a secret drinker?’