“Pa!” she exclaimed. “Friday evening. We were outside on the lawn having a glass of champagne with Fanny and Louis and his brothers, do you remember?” She turned to Redfyre and added, “That’s the Robertsons, old family friends from London. We were laughing and talking and not paying attention to anything around us—you must have noticed how secluded it is down there. Louis suddenly broke off in the middle of a sentence. He has sharper ears than a horse. “What’s that?” he said. The rest of us had heard nothing. “Breaking glass and a shout. Over there.” He pointed towards the college.

“And Pa reminded him where he was. In a college full of undergraduates celebrating the end of their year. Louis laughed and went on with his story.”

“What time was this?” Redfyre asked.

“We never uncork champagne before six, and we were a long way down the first and hadn’t started on the second,” Rosa said. “So it would have been between six-thirty and seven when we went inside to have the dinner the cook had left out for us. The Robertsons don’t much care to dine in hall.”

“There’s no sign of broken glass in here,” Wells murmured.

Rosa had gone to the central window of the three, pointing out black scuffmarks below the sill. “That’s shoe polish!” She leaned out. “Oh my! Come and look,” she said, and in a steady voice: “There’s broken glass out there in the court. Broken body, too.”

Redfyre was with her in a stride, pulling her away from the sill. He leaned over, the master alongside, and they took in the details, muttering to each other.

“That’s Fanshawe! I’d know that silver thatch anywhere,” Wells said. “Dead, of course.” For a moment, his deliberate calm cracked as he appealed to Redfyre. “What the hell, Redfyre? Why Fanshawe?”

The inspector kept his response low and professional. “We’ll assume, unless the pathologist has other ideas, that if that is indeed Fanshawe, he met his end on Friday evening, falling headfirst onto a very resilient stone paving. A flower bed, he might just have survived . . . And there’s the glass. The remains of a sherry glass, is it? Look, still clutched in his right hand. And there’s the sherry bottle—just beyond his head, that spreading dark brown stain.”

“John, shall I go and call for the police? More police, I mean?” Rosa asked.