‘But we did it brutally. You can’t say we didn’t. We grieved him frightfully. He said so.’

Sir Henry had said so a great many times and with extreme emphasis. It was impossible to suggest that anger rather than grief had moved him. Troy went off on another tack. ‘He seemed to have got over it,’ she said.

‘Last night!’ Fenella wailed. ‘When I think of what we said about him last night. In the drawing-room after you’d gone up. Everybody except Mummy and Paul. Aunt Milly said he’d probably have an attack, and I said I didn’t care if it was fatal. Actually! And he did feel it. He cut Aunt Pauline and Mummy and me and Paul out of his Will because of our engagement and the way we announced it. So he did feel it deeply.’

‘The Will,’ thought Troy. ‘Good heavens, yes. The Will!’ She said: ‘He was an old man, Fenella. I don’t think, do you, that the future was exactly propitious? Isn’t it perhaps not so very bad that he should go now when everything seemed to him to be perfectly arranged. He’d had his splendid party.’

‘And look how it ended.’

‘Oh, dear!’ said Troy. ‘That. Well, yes.’

‘And it was probably the party that killed him,’ Fenella continued. ‘That hot crayfish. It’s what everybody thinks. Dr Withers had warned him. And nobody was there. He just went up to his room and died.’

‘Has Dr Withers—?’

‘Yes. He’s been. Barker got Aunt Milly and she rang up. He says it was a severe attack of gastro-enteritis. He says it—it happened—it must have been—soon after he went up to bed. It’s so awful when you think of all the frightful things we were saying about him down there in the drawing-room. All of us except Cedric, and he was simply gloating over us. Little beast, he’s still gloating, if it comes to that.’

The gong rumbled distantly. ‘You go down to breakfast,’ said Fenella. ‘I can’t face it.’

‘That won’t do at all. You can at least choke down some coffee.’

Fenella took Troy’s arm in a nervous grip. ‘I think I like you so much,’ she said, ‘because you’re so unlike all of us. All right, I’ll come.’