Hobbes kept his attention on her. ‘You mean she had used them on someone?’

Camilla grimaced. ‘Herself. She had stabbed herself. Here … the place …’ Her fingers were tracing along her stomach. ‘That one sacred place, where the blood still flowed in her, where she still breathed, and thought of herself as being alive and present. Everything else was rotten, all other parts of her, decayed, or decaying, or dead.’ Camilla took another breath. ‘And then Nicholas stepped forward. Close to her. I thought he was embracing her. But no … no. He was … he was …’

Her eyes told the truth. First her eyes, then her lips.

‘He stabbed her. Again. Again. And again.’

Camilla’s voice quietened. She could hardly gather a single breath.

‘And again …’ Hushed now. ‘He was completing the action Adeline had started. Until she slumped to the floor and lay there, trembling a little … and then falling still at last.’

There wasn’t a sound in the room.

Hobbes was going to speak, but then he watched in utter fascination as Camilla slowly undid her body from the knot it had contracted into during this long telling. Her shoulders relaxed, the non-existent pair of scissors fell from her empty hands, her arms stretched out and her fingers uncurled. Her head came up and the creases left her neck and brow. Her eyes opened wide. Her lips parted.

‘I have told everything,’ she said. ‘There is no more.’

‘You could have gone to the police,’ Latimer said.

Camilla’s answer was spoken plainly, without a shred of doubt: ‘Our family looks after itself. We are self-contained, and self-motivated, our own judge and jury.’

‘And what? You found Nicholas innocent?’

Her reply was simple. ‘Adeline was at peace. We believed, all of us, that she wanted this to happen. Nothing else mattered.’

Hobbes nodded. He waited for a moment to let Camilla settle. Then he said, ‘And each year after that you met up as a family to perform the ritual, with the dress, the tear in the cloth, the spilling of the blood?’

‘That’s right. Each year, on the same night. Leonard wrote us a script, with the parts we had to play, and the lines to say. You might find it in his papers, somewhere in the house, if he kept it. On the first anniversary we buried the dress in the cellar, her scarf and shoes. And we placed mementoes alongside her, trinkets for the journey, the things we each owned that Adeline liked to play with as a child. I gave her my grandmother’s brooch, with its missing ruby. Each object meant something different to each of us. And we buried the dress and said our prayers. It was a proper burial, to replace the one we could not give her, for obvious reasons.’

‘The body was elsewhere, hidden away?’

‘It was.’

‘And the next year?’

‘The same ceremony, but a little less grand, less ritualistic, and each year after that, as they went by, with less weeping, more quickly spoken, with fewer mourners, as first Nicholas and then Rosamund made their excuses, and then it was just myself, Leonard and Mary Estelle. We kept up the tradition for as long as we could, until I left Bridlemere at last, and Mother was put away in the home. And then it was Leonard alone, each year performing his little theatre play, just for himself and for the spirit of the dead girl.’