‘I tell you what, Mrs M.,’ Alfred said as he prepared to set the dinner table. ‘The weather in this household has deteriorated and the forecast is for atmospheric disturbances followed by severe storms.’

‘Go on!’ Mrs Mitchell said eagerly. ‘How?’

‘How, I don’t know. If you ask me why, I can give a pretty good guess. For ten years, Mrs M., we’ve organized ourselves quietly and comfortably in the way that suits us. Everything very nice and going by clockwork. Nothing unexpected. Settled. No upsets of any kind whatsoever. Suits us and incidentally, I may say, suits you and me. Now what? What’s the present situation? Look at today. We’ve had more upsets in this one day, Mrs M., than we’ve had to put up with in the total length of my service.’

Mrs Mitchell executed the toss of the head and upward turn of the eyes that had only one connotation.

‘Him?’ she suggested.

‘Exactly. Him,’ Alfred said. ‘Mr Harold Cartell.’

‘Good God, Mr Belt!’ Mrs Mitchell exclaimed. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

‘The matter, Mrs M.?’

‘The way you looked! Coo! Only for a sec but my word! Talk about old-fashioned.’

‘You’d look old-fashioned yourself,’ Alfred countered, ‘if suggestions of the same nature were made to you.’

‘By ‘im?’ she prompted, unguardedly.

‘Correct. In reference to our cigarette-case. Which, as I mentioned earlier, was left by those two on the window-ledge and has disappeared. Well. As we noticed this afternoon, Mr Cartell went off in the Bloodbath with George Copper and Bert Raikes.’

‘Very peculiar, yes.’

‘Yes. All right. It now appears they went to Baynesholme.’

‘To the Big House?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well! To see her ladyship?’

‘To see them. Those two. They’d gone there, if you please. Unasked, by all accounts.’

‘Sauce!’

‘What it was all about I have not yet gathered, but will from George Copper. The point is that when I take drinks to the library just now, they’re at it hammer-and-tongs.’

‘Our two gentlemen?’

‘Who else? And so hot they don’t stop when they see me. At least he doesn’t. Mr C. He was saying he’d forgotten in the heat of the moment at Baynesholme to ask young Leiss and that Moppett about where they’d left the cigarette-case and Mr Period was saying the young lady, Miss Maitland-Mayne, saw it on the sill. And I was asked to say if it was there when I cleared and I said no. And I added that someone had opened the window.’

‘Who?’