By now, Harry, Cliff and Joyce had removed their equipment and were presumably recording the manner in which the dining-room had been tampered with. Paul, at one and the same time, listened to the three men and pondered the fact that he had not mentioned to the others the events of the previous night. He realized he felt confused. He knew he still did not trust them all; he wondered if he trusted any of them completely.

At that moment he recognized that he was uneasy at the thought of spending yet another night under this roof, in that freezing cold bedroom. Conscious of Carol’s warm shoulders through the fabric of her jersey, he tightened his grasp. She turned her head, smiled slightly, her deep blue eyes meeting his gaze steadily. He smiled in return, squeezed her shoulder again. He caught Ann looking almost sombrely at them and included her in his smile.

From the men’s discussion he realized that they were trying to arrange a pairing-up that mixed up the members of the groups – a sign of mutual distrust, he felt – and establish a search procedure that cut out any possibility of the lurker circling round the searchers to cut back into a part of the house already cleared. And in that mode of parallel streams of consciousness sometimes experienced, he heard his own train of thought weigh up the chances of getting a fire going in their bedroom, whether a request for logs and coal would be considered unfair, a needless squandering of the house’s stock of fuel, or even, he thought, made from a motive to render the bedroom less off-putting to newly weds. A wave of frustrated desire swept over him and he wished fervently that he and Carol were shot of the lot of them, cosily within their cottage.

‘All right then,’ Pollard was saying. ‘We’ll take the floors from the cellars up.’ He tapped the paper before them. ‘There are two ways up from the cellars. I propose we put people at the top of these stairs while others search the cellar area. Once we’ve cleared that level, and made sure there’s no other way in, we can go over the ground floor. The group coming up into the scullery will search scullery, kitchen and dining-room. Those coming up into the corridor by the butler’s pantry will search it, the hall, the lounge, billiards-room and conservatory. We’ll keep some people in the hall while this is going on. And,’ he added, his gaze going from Bourne to Smith, ‘we make sure that all windows are secure. Dr Bourne, can we seal off this conservatory and billiards-room?’

‘We can do that. All we need to do is to close that double door between the billiards-room and lounge, nail boards across the doors and put seals on.’