“Mrs. Parry felt guilty about selling her land to Henshaw,” Mary said, “and after I’d spoken to her that afternoon she decided to try to buy the field back. Of course Henshaw refused to sell. There must have been an argument and Henshaw told Mrs. Parry about James. You can imagine him, can’t you, blurting it out in the middle of the row: “You won’t get any support, you know, from that nephew of yours. I’m paying him off. You’ve no chance without the publicity of getting the support for your campaign.” Then Mrs. Parry not wanting to believe it but seeing in the end that it was probably true. Poor Mrs. Parry. How upset she must have been.”

“James Laidlaw was waiting for her in the garden when she got back from the pub,” Ramsay said, taking the initiative for the first time. The pretence that he was the passive recipient of her knowledge was over. After all, he had promised Mary some useful information. “Stella had taken a sleeping pill and it was easy enough for him to leave the room without anyone noticing. He went out through the kitchen door. Max was watching television and didn’t hear anything.”

He pictured James in the windy garden with its smell of ivy and salt in the black shadow of the Tower, waiting for Alice, wondering what Henshaw had told her. Then she had come back, angry and disappointed, threatening to expose him. He had killed her, stabbing her from behind with a knife he had taken from the kitchen as he had followed her into the house.

“I didn’t see James,” Mary said, breaking into his thoughts. She was embarrassed. It was a sort of confession. “ I was in the churchyard waiting for Max. He didn’t turn up. I supposed, of course, that it meant that he’d decided to stay with Judy. I was upset. I thought he didn’t care about me. I left soon after eleven and I saw no one in the Tower garden then. But perhaps James was hiding.”

“No,” Ramsay said. “He couldn’t have been hiding. He was seen by someone in the village.”

“Who?” she demanded. “Who saw him?”

It was his turn to tease her. “Can’t you guess?” he asked.

“Charlie Elliot!” she said, delighted because she had worked it out after all. “ It must have been Charlie Elliot, but you said he was home before Mrs. Parry died.”

“He was,” Ramsay said. “ But he came out again. He was drunk, a little amorous. He’d always been obsessed with Maggie Kerr and he stood in the street and stared up at her window. On his way home he must have seen James Laidlaw standing in the moonlight in the middle of the Tower lawn waiting for Mrs. Parry. It wouldn’t have meant anything to him until the next day when he heard about Mrs. Parry’s death.”