“Set up,” Sir Dooley said, suddenly sitting up straight in his armchair. “Quite obvious now. The whole thing was planned. Someone was planning to kill Roach and pin the blame on Thaddy. That’s why the club was conveniently on the table. And you say that Thaddy can’t remember a thing about that evening except that he got very drunk? I’d wager he was drugged. What if a sleeping draft was put in his whiskey?”

“Well done, Dooley,” Oona said, beaming at him. “I knew your superior brain would figure it out.”

“Then who could it have been?” I asked. “Apart from the manservant himself?”

“Why not the manservant?” Oona demanded.

“What motive could he have had?” I said. “If he had wanted to rob his master he would not have reported the death and would have been long gone by the time Mr. Roach’s body was found. And now he is without a job.”

“Then someone paid him to be party to the murder,” Dooley said. “Paid him well enough to keep quiet, or even to help with it.”

I thought of Mickey’s face when Zou Zou confronted him. He definitely had been wary.

“Maybe someone threatened him and frightened him into helping,” I suggested.

“Exactly. So all the police have to do is to find a way to make him talk,” Oona said. “And what’s the plan for you next?”

“I’m not really sure. We should try to locate this American professor, don’t you think? And the young priest? They were both seen close to the castle. Maybe one of them was not who he claimed to be. We suspect the professor invented a nonexistent university. And we understand that none of the neighboring parishes has a young priest.”

“Jolly good plan,” she said.

“But apart from that, we have to wait and see if anyone in America recognizes the man who called himself Timothy Roach, or if his fingerprints can be identified,” I went on.

“That could take weeks, couldn’t it?” Oona said. “Ship across the Atlantic, trains across the continent. It could drag on and on, and all the time poor Thaddy is hounded by the press and deemed a criminal.”

“Don’t they have ways of sending photographs by cable these days?” Dooley said. “I’m pretty sure I read that in the newspaper. That should speed things up.”

As I sat there, still feeling the effects of the wine I’d drunk at dinner, and the heat of the crackling fire, I was suddenly overcome with tiredness.

“I hope you don’t think it rude of me,” I said, “but I’m feeling awfully tired. Would you mind if I went up to bed? We can resume this discussion with Darcy in the morning. Maybe by then Sir Dooley will have come up with more brilliant ideas.”

“Off you go, then, my dear,” Oona said. “Should I have Treadwell send you up a hot drink?”