She looked at the room carefully. The fine furniture in its extra years of dust, the glowing oases of polished tables, the chess game, still going on, the sofas and chairs drawn to the white marble fireplace of pillars and shields.

Anna lay on the carpet before the fireplace.

She seemed to have fallen from a chair, for her embroidery was scattered on it, the coloured silks bleeding over.

Anna lay very decorously, her dark skirts arranged and her hands by her sides. Her head was turned a little to her right and on her forehead was a vivid mark like a splash of red and purple paint.

Something protruded from her left breast.

Rachaela moved forward and stared at this thing nonsensically, until all at once it dawned upon her that it was the rounded head of a steel knitting needle.

It had been struck home with such force that only the floor at Anna’s back had stopped it.

Anna’s face was stupefied, almost tranquil, but her mouth had come open in the way that Sylvian’s had done.

Rachaela heard a little soft noise behind her, and then a violent crash of breaking glass. A wild animal wail broke forth, like that of something caught in a trap.

She turned and saw Maria, who had dropped the silver tray of decanters and bottles, breaking most of them. The wreckage lay bloody on the floor. Maria howled, but only once, then she ran from the room.

Rachaela felt sick. The walls tilted and righted themselves. Anna was dead. Anna had been killed.

And all Rachaela could do was stand here, perhaps guiltily, looking over and over at the stigma of a blow on Anna’s forehead and the needle sticking up from her breast.

The others came in quietly. They shuffled in from their nooks and crevices. The Scarabae. No one else screamed. Once or twice there was a muffled little cry. Rachaela did not turn round to see. She felt herself transfixed. Was it just that she was like them?

Finally someone came past her, and it was Stephan, who went and stood over Anna, looking down at her and making strange aimless motions with his hands, as if smoothing out waves of air.

Then Carlo came and lifted Anna and put her on a sofa.

There was no blood on the carpet. The needle had plugged the wound it made, the mark on the forehead had scarcely bled.

The Scarabae pressed round Anna on the sofa, moving past Rachaela as if she were a chair. They did not suspect her, then.

She found herself counting them, toting up their names, Livia, Anita, Unice, Miriam, Jack, Eric, George and Teresa, Sasha, Miranda, and Stephan. And there Cheta and Maria like blind ghosts, and Carlo and Michael. And Anna.

Stephan said, ‘Must have struck her first, and then when she fell, done it then.’

‘Alice’s needle,’ said Miranda. ‘Size five.’

‘How?’ said George.