“I only live around the corner,” I lied. He let me go on my way, but I could tell he wasn’t happy about it. The farther I went, the more I agreed with him. I heard the sound of Big Ben striking midnight, borne across the city on the breeze. It was cold and I wrapped my coat around me. Belgrave Square slumbered in darkness; so did Rannoch House. No sign of a constable. I went up the steps and put my key in the lock. The front door swung open. I stepped inside, fumbling for the light switch. The hall light threw long shadows up the staircase and I considered, for the first time, that the body might still be lying in the bathtub. I usually pride myself on my sangfroid: when I was three my brother and some friends home for the school holidays had lowered me into the disused well in the courtyard at Castle Rannoch in an attempt to discover whether it was bottomless, as reputed. Fortunately for me, it was not. And once I had sat on the battlements all night in the hope of seeing my grandfather’s ghost playing the bagpipes. But the thought of de Mauxville rising from the bathtub to exact revenge was so overwhelmingly disgusting that I could hardly make my feet go up the stairs.

I reached the first landing, then turned on the light and started up the second flight. I let out a little squeak and almost lost my footing as an ominous shadow reared over me, arm raised. It took my heart a couple of minutes to start beating again, before I realized that it was only the statue of an avenging angel that had been banished to the second-floor landing after Binky had chipped its nose with a cricket bat. I felt very foolish and chided myself as I continued up the stairs. Someone had cleaned the water from the floor. The bathroom door was shut. I tiptoed across the landing to Binky’s bedroom at the front of the house. The note was no longer on the bed. I hoped that it might have fallen onto the floor and knelt down to look under the bed. I recoiled in horror as my knee touched a wet patch, and stood up again, my heart beating wildly. I made myself kneel and examine the patch and decided that it was nothing more than water. That could be easily enough explained—Binky had come into his room dripping wet from his bath and left a wet towel on the floor. I went carefully around the room, looking for clues, but found nothing.