He finished dinner quickly, gulped down a scalding cup of tea and pushed back from the table. “If you can get someone else’s mother or father to pick you up, then I’ll drop you off. But it has to be soon.”

Davina jumped up and hugged him. “Thanks, Daddy.”

“Right,” Livingston replied as he watched her go pounding up the staircase so she could make the all-important phone calls in private.

There was always the chance that Val and Philip might get back early. In the meantime, he could visit with Penelope for a while. You never knew what tidbits she might be able to offer.

Giggling should be against the law, Livingston thought an hour later as he dropped off Davina and her friends at cinema. It was ten of eight. When he had phoned Llewellyn Hall, Emma Home had promised to wait until he got there to admit him. “But don’t make it any later than eight, please, sir, there’s a program I want to watch tonight and I hate to miss the beginning. Turn it on even a minute or two late and you can’t make head nor tail of it.”

A rocket scientist, Livingston thought.

When he arrived, Emma was standing at the door, her large handbag firmly clasped in her arm.

“You know where her bedroom is. She’s looking forward to seeing you. She’s all fluffed up in bed, suffering for a visit. Better you than me.” With the speed of light, Horne was backing her Land Rover out of the driveway, firing deadly pebbles into Philip’s flower beds.

Livingston stood in the foyer a moment and looked around. If only the portraits of Sir Gilbert Exner’s crusty ancestors could talk, he reflected as they glowered down at him. This house was a good three hundred years old. Forget the first two hundred ninety years. He’d love to know what had been going on here for the last ten. Not to mention the woods outside where Athena’s body had been found.

He heard a greeting from upstairs. “I say, I’m up here,” Penelope bellowed.

“I thought she was supposed to be half dead,” Livingston muttered as he started up the stairs.

Penelope looked infinitely better than she had when he visited her in hospital. But that still wasn’t saying very much. Livingston removed a sorry-looking teddy bear from her rocking chair, the only available seat in the room, and sat down, immediately forced to use his feet as brakes as the chair squeaked back and forth. The momentum finally subsided when Livingston got up, grabbed the chair and held it until it was still, and sat down again very warily. How many more years till my retirement? he wondered.

“You’re looking well this evening, Miss Atwater,” he lied.

“Oh, do you think so?” She flashed a smile that brought to mind that ridiculous American program “Mr. Ed.”