I lay awake for hours, listening to footsteps tramping up and down the stairs. Once I swear I heard the police dog panting in the hall. When the police left, I could hear Kate was tidying up in the kitchen, talking in a whisper that would have reached the back row of any auditorium.

‘So, you don’t think,’ she was asking Adam, ‘that this intruder was the same man who broke into Nick’s and killed him and that he was looking for something he didn’t find?’

Adam’s only reply was a long, drawn-out yawn.

‘And that whoever-it-is – the murderer I mean,’ Kate prattled on, ‘thinks that Juno’s got it now, this thing that he was searching for?’

‘We don’t know Nick’s killer was searching for anything,’ Adam replied testily. ‘He wasn’t robbed … Christ, I’m going to bed. I’ve got to get up in two and a half hours.’

‘Just because Nick wasn’t robbed, doesn’t mean the murderer wasn’t looking for something.’ Kate was babbling on unstoppably as she turned off the kitchen light and followed him to their bedroom.

After the house had quietened down, I listened to my own head throbbing. Had I been wrong all along about Vlad and Igor? Could Richard have killed his father? Had they quarrelled, had Nick refused a request for money? During dinner I had glimpsed a darker nature beneath the amiable idiot that Richard tried so hard to portray, but that didn’t mean he was a murderer. There was Helena, of course. She’d hated Nick apparently − could she and Richard have conspired together? Were they lying about the true value of the rings? Could Helena have committed the murder on her own? If she had, she must be a pretty cool customer. And surely, neither she nor Richard had murdered Bert. Perhaps their deaths weren’t connected after all, perhaps it was just a grotesque coincidence.

Something rustled in the room and a moment later Bill landed lightly on my stomach, shredding what was left of my nerves. He was overjoyed to have found me, his paws padding up and down on my sternum, and set up a saw-like purr. I stroked his head idly with one hand. After several minutes of delirious padding, he tucked his paws primly under him and slept.

Something about Richard’s account of things that evening bothered me. He had turned his car around, he said, and was just driving away up the road when he’d happened to glance in his rear-view mirror and seen a masked man – ‘It was definitely a man’, those were his words – leaving by the front door.