Her mistress, who had been seated in an armchair within curtain-twitching reach of the window overlooking the front garden, now arose and came unsteadily to meet him. Largely, he thought cynically, to demonstrate how feeble and thoroughly unprotected she was. Her black silk skirt and white blouse of Edwardian cut emphasised her vulnerable state. He took the thin, cold fingers she offered him by way of handshake, trying not to crush them in his bear’s paw, and murmured the usual polite formulae for greeting a respectable old dame who has, to her great personal inconvenience, allowed a policeman to intrude upon her calm existence.

“Now then, Beattie,” he said with a growl of brusque friendliness, “this won’t take long if you answer up straight and true. My car’s parked round the corner, so as not to give your neighbours anything to gossip about. I have good manners, you see, for a policeman. I can be in it and back on my way to the Leeds nick in ten—”

“Inspector!” she interrupted him in a firm, angry voice, stripping him of two ranks in one word. “My name is Beata, not Beattie! And to gentlemen of the police force, I am Mrs. Fox.”

“Thank you for enlightening me. I’m Hesketh Frogmore MacFarlane. Mackie to my friends. Superintendent to you, Missis. Shall we proceed?”

She narrowed her eyes and nodded. “If we must. But first . . .” She tugged on a bell pull, and when the maid entered with a bob, called briefly for “the tray, Maisie. The drinks tray.”

Turning again to MacFarlane: “Six o’clock is not a social hour in this village, Superintendent. You have missed the tea I had thought of offering you when you made your initial approach and suggested five o’clock. Cook had prepared a very good barm cake. Pity.”

The tray must have been waiting on the hall table, since it was brought in at once.

“What may I offer you? We have sherry, scotch, spa water, lemonade or my bilberry cordial diluted with tonic water.”

MacFarlane’s eyes ran longingly over the Red Label Johnnie Walker before he remembered his early start and exhausting journey and the convivial evening he was looking forward to with his old army mates, and his eyes flicked back to the intriguingly purple-red brew in a ship’s decanter.

“Would that be bilberries from the moors?” he asked.

“I picked them myself, not a quarter of a mile away. It’s last year’s harvest, of course, and at its best full flavour now. I find that half Barbados and half white sugar give the best colour. I put some down every year as I have done since I was a girl.”

“Then that’s what I will have, thank you.”

Jones obliged, tinkling glasses and squirting tonic. Without being asked, she served her mistress a large, rich sherry.