She had inherited a comfortable sum of money on her mother’s death, and as Mr Jones drove her off in their new motor car under the admiring gaze of the neighbours, she felt she would burst with pride.

Her replacement, Ailsa Bridge, filed Harry’s cases, typed his letters and occasionally fortified herself with gin. She no longer kept a bottle in her desk drawer but had a flask of gin firmly anchored by one garter under her skirts.

Harry was plucking up courage to try to call on Rose. It was only his duty, he told himself. He at last presented himself at the earl’s mansion to be told that Lady Rose was not at home. This he translated that she was not being allowed to see him.

Rose was, in fact, upstairs in the drawing-room being confronted by her parents. ‘It’s no use your protesting, my girl,’ the earl was saying. ‘It’s India for you. And don’t threaten me with that business of me stopping the king visiting. It would harm you as much as me, and that precious Captain Cathcart would go to prison. The season’s nearly at an end. You’ve led us all to think that you might accept Baker-Willis after all and then you tell us some story that he had threatened to beat you, which I don’t believe. Should have beaten you myself.

‘I will arrange for you to sail at the end of the summer. You may take Levine with you, but you’ll be staying with the Hulberts, remember them?’

‘I do. Mrs Hulbert is a cross, overbearing woman.’

‘Enough of that. Need someone to keep an eye on you. Get yourself a nice officer. No adventurers, mind.’

Inspector Judd said to his superior, ‘You never quite believed Lady Rose’s story, did you, sir?’

‘No, I did not. Oh, yes, the Stockton woman did commit the murders, but I think either Lady Rose or Cathcart found the blackmailing stuff. I think they’re protecting Lord Alfred.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that young man had an affair with another man, I’m sure of that. I just sense it.’

‘But that should have been reported!’

‘I let it go because we got our murderer and we’ve enough on our plate without hounding Lord Alfred. But I do think that somehow Lady Rose or Captain Cathcart decided to take the law into their own hands. I don’t like it. Let’s just hope Lady Rose settles down and gets married. I’m sure she’s the one who causes all the trouble. Women always do.’

The superintendent did not see the paradox in that in his dreams of the revolution, there were always beautiful women on the barricades beside him, armed to the teeth and waving the red flag.

‘What am I to do?’ wailed Rose later that day. ‘I don’t want to go to India and sit in the heat while the memsahibs gossip about me.’

Daisy bit her thumb and looked at her sideways. ‘If I were you, I’d go to the captain for help.’