“Far too good for him. Her family came from down south. They’d been silk workers immigrating from France. Not much cash to start with, but lots of business sense. And fancy ways. I never knew what she saw in Syd. Anyway, Grace waited for him, and they were wed as soon as he came back. And that’s when it started.”

“What started, Beattie?”

“The boom, they called it. Syd said Grace had brought a bit of a dowry with her in a continental way, and he had his army savings. He took over. He bought up the rival shop in the village. Next year he bought three more out of the profits, and it snowballed. Everything he and Grace touched did well. Well enough to send their son to one of those private schools. I came out against sending a seven-year-old kiddie off to a school in the south. With his rough Yorkshire ways, he’d get a right kicking, I said. They just laughed. Of course, they were right. They’d employed a nanny for the little one right from the start. A London nanny who spoke proper. And his uncle Herbert had been giving him training in shooting and self-defence every summer holiday for years. Said he was preparing him for entry to Sandhurst military college.

“But in the end it didn’t take. Waste of time! My grandson was much more interested in pursuing a university career. He’s been reading history at Cambridge . . .” Beattie’s frilled bosom swelled with grandmotherly pride, and her string of Whitby jet mourning beads stirred into a pattering applause. “He graduated last summer. And now he’s working for his doctorate, and eventually he’ll enter Parliament. Killing things and people was never going to be Digby’s way in life.”

MacFarlane bit back a facetious riposte to that rosy view of national politics.

She turned over a page or two and pointed. “There they are! Uncle Herbert and Digby and some creature they’d just stalked and shot up on the moors. And here’s my lovely grandson as he really is: wearing his gown and mortarboard on the front lawn of his new college four years ago.”

“Oh, I know that ivy-shrouded doorway. That would be—?”

“St. Jude’s Cambridge. Ah, is that the connection? Is that why you’re here? Has something happened in Cambridge?”

MacFarlane was flummoxed. He had no idea himself why he was up here, wandering down Briary Lane with Mrs. Fox and her family album. He had no wish to alarm her with garbled stories about bodies littering Cambridge and all occasioned by a contact with Jude’s. Witnesses always liked to be proved right. They loved to say, I told you so! He’d press that button.