‘Come in and sit down, Lady Rose,’ said Kerridge. He thought she looked a picture. She was wearing a white lace blouse with a high boned collar and a dark skirt of some silky material which rustled when she walked.

‘No,’ he said to Harry. ‘We did check that. Mr Pomfret did not have a safe-deposit box.’

‘Now that Mrs Trumpington is dead,’ said Rose, ‘perhaps it might be an idea to check if Mrs Stockton or Lord Alfred have been paying out any large sums of money recently. You see, if whoever murdered Freddy took blackmail material, he might have decided to go into business himself.’

‘Yes,’ said Kerridge, ‘but that assumes that the murderer is someone other than the two of them. But we’ll check anyway. Now, Lady Rose, before I start to question you on this case, you haven’t seen anyone suspicious lurking around?’

‘What other case?’

‘Dr McWhirter.’

‘Oh.’ Rose exchanged a glance with Harry and said quickly, ‘No, not a sight of the man.’

She suddenly remembered McWhirter as he had stood pointing the gun at her and then the sight of his dead body. She turned pale, gave a choked little sound, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and ran from the room.

Kerridge leaned back in his chair and studied Harry’s face. ‘I’ve always known Lady Rose to be exceptionally brave, but when I mention McWhirter she nearly faints.’

‘I think she’s suffering from delayed shock,’ said Harry. ‘The fact that her parents put her in an asylum was a terrible fright. It distressed her no end.’

‘If you say so. Never take the law into your own hands, Captain Cathcart, or I will treat you like a common criminal.’

‘Of course,’ said Harry blandly. ‘Are we all confined to the house?’

‘Yes, until I finish my investigations. Why?’

‘I wanted to go up to my office to see if there are any messages for me.’

‘Got someone there on a Sunday to take them?’

‘No,’ said Harry, defeated. All at once he regretted having told Miss Jubbles about Rose and hoped against hope she would keep her mouth shut. But he was determined to find a way to get back to where he had put the body and the car in the Thames to make absolutely sure no one could see anything from the river bank.

Old Mrs Jubbles lived in a perpetual rage. Her daughter, Dora Jubbles, of whom she had held such high hopes, had announced her engagement to the baker, Mr Jones.

She had proceeded to make her daughter’s life as much of a living hell as she could manage and Miss Jubbles had retaliated by leaving home to live in sin with the baker until the wedding in several weeks’ time.