“But why didn’t Charlie tell you about James?” She had taken a notebook from her pocket and was scribbling details in shorthand. The door opened and Hunter slipped quietly into the room, but she took no notice of him.

“Because it would have meant admitting that he was out of the house at about the time Mrs. Parry died,” Ramsay said. “ Besides, he hoped to use the information against Laidlaw.”

“And that’s why he died,” she said.

He nodded.

“Charlie phoned Laidlaw the day he disappeared,” Hunter said. “Laidlaw promised to come to his hideout the next day with enough money for Charlie to go abroad, start again. Instead he came up early in the morning and killed him.”

He spoke with great satisfaction and she looked at him with distaste. She seemed small and very tired. The euphoria of her story and the pleasure in the completeness of all the details had gone. She was realising, Ramsay thought, how close she had been to becoming the third victim.

“I didn’t realise about Charlie Elliot,” she said. “I thought he was the murderer. It never occurred to me that James might have killed his aunt. I thought it was just about money.” She paused. “Why did he do it?” she asked. “Why was he so desperate for money? The paper can’t have been doing badly.”

Ramsay looked at Hunter to check his facts. “It was Stella,” he said. “As you said, she has expensive tastes. Everyone thought her father paid for that big house by the river, but he’d had nothing to do with her since she went into hospital. James was afraid of losing her. He thought if he gave her everything she wanted he might keep her happy.”

“What will she do now?” Mary asked.

Ramsay shook his head. “I don’t know.” But it wasn’t Stella who concerned him. It was the child with the white hair and the transparent skin who had lost the only adults she could trust. He never knew that Carolyn had realised almost from the beginning that her father had killed Alice Parry. Peter, sleepless with excitement, had seen his uncle on the lawn, waiting. He had told Carolyn because he told her everything and he had kept the secret because she had wanted him to. Yet though Ramsay never knew of that terrible responsibility, he considered her the real victim of the case.

Ramsay heard from Mary again two months later. She phoned him at Otterbridge and offered to buy him lunch.

“To celebrate,” she said. “I’ve just got a job on the Journal.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. It had been impossible in the weeks after the Brinkbonnie murders to escape Mary’s picture in the press and the articles of the “local intrepid reporter who finds solution to murder mystery.” She had even been on national television. “They’re lucky to have you.”