“He never lost interest in you, not even after your mother moved on to—” he finished that phrase discreetly with a cough. “And when your father died, he was most concerned. ‘I don’t like to think of that girl growing up without a penny to her name,’ he said to me. He hinted it was clear your mother was never going to provide for you.”

“How very kind of him,” I muttered, almost moved to tears, “but surely Mr. Hautbois should have been left the lion’s share of the estate. He is Sir Hubert’s ward, after all.”

“The master felt that too much money might not be in Mr. Tristram’s best interests,” the butler said dryly. “Nor Monsieur de Mauxville’s, even though he was his sister’s only child. Addicted to gambling apparently. Moved in shady circles.”

I fought to retain my composure while the butler took me downstairs to meet Cook and then had to eat a slice of her famous Victoria sponge I had always adored as a child. All that time my thoughts were in utter turmoil. The will gave Tristram a motive for wanting both de Mauxville and myself out of the way, but I had no proof that he had done anything. On the contrary, Tristram’s slight build against the stocky de Mauxville made it hard to believe that he had carried out that murder. Unless he had had an accomplice. I remembered the pally conversation at Whiffy’s house when I had been cleaning floors and they hadn’t known I could speak French. So it could have been a conspiracy, beneficial to both of them. Which meant I had two sources of danger, not one, waiting for me back at Farlows.

The obvious thing was to go to the police, even to summon Chief Inspector Burnall of Scotland Yard, but I realized that everything I would tell him was pure supposition. How clever my assailant had been. Every one of those attacks could be passed off as an accident. And as for killing de Mauxville, there was nothing that linked Tristram to that crime.

As I turned out onto the road another idea struck me. Maybe Tristram wasn’t the killer at all. I hadn’t found out who would inherit Sir Hubert’s estate if both Tristram and I were dead. Whiffy had mentioned something about Tristram falling over a suit of armor the night before. What if there was another person lurking in the background, waiting for an opportunity to get rid of Tristram and me?