“I’m afraid it is my business,” Ramsay said. “Do you realise that you’re a suspect in a murder enquiry, Mr. Henshaw? We believe that Charlie Elliot was murdered by the same person as Alice Parry. We’re still looking for her killer. If you have any information that would eliminate you from our enquiries, it would be in your interest to give it.”

“Colin was here when Alice Parry was killed,” Celia Grey said. “You were right. My husband was visiting his mother in hospital in the Lake District. I’d rather you didn’t ask my son, but you were right about that, too. Colin was still here when he arrived home.”

“What about Monday evening?” Ramsay asked. “Was Mr. Henshaw here then, too? Is that why you didn’t notice any noise in the farmyard?”

She nodded.

“Thank you,” Ramsay said. They were a strangely matched couple, he thought. She seemed so upright and cold. He could picture her dressed in Puritan black and white as one of the New England settlers, motivated by principle and guilt.

Henshaw, in contrast, was driven by greed and ambition and seemed to have no sense of morality at all. Yet he looked at her now with tenderness and admiration and he had done everything in his power to protect her. “ It would have been easier,” Ramsay said, “if you’d told me straightaway.”

“I couldn’t have Celia bothered,” Henshaw muttered. “ I had to consider her reputation. She has her position in the village to think about. Don’t you know she’s chairwoman of the WI?”

There was no irony in his voice. It seemed to Ramsay then that Henshaw was the innocent and Celia Grey was the corrupter of souls. He wondered when and how the relationship had started. He thought it could have no future.

“Now I know all about your affair,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me what really happened in your conversation with Alice Parry.”

“Nothing,” Henshaw said rudely. “I’ve told you everything that happened. There’s nothing more to say.”

Ramsay did not believe him, but time was slipping past and he was no nearer to reaching a solution. He left them, closeted in the half darkness, sharing their secret, frightened affection.

Chapter Twenty-Three