The empty packet of aspirin tablets which Mrs Bradley had found in the badgers’ sett had certainly not been there when the snow was on the ground. It was dry, and in good condition. Whether it had been left there without malice, or whether (as she strongly suspected) to drop a broad hint of the manner in which Bill Fullalove had met his death, she could not decide. She had done the only possible thing under the circumstances: she had destroyed it. It was not evidence, and therefore it must not, she felt definitely, complicate a business which was already not very simple.

The insurance plot, she was almost sure, had been made by the cousins jointly. One policy between them, obtained on the strength of Bill’s health, was a neat form of economy and the fraud was quite likely to have gone undetected. She wondered whether the cousins wrote an identical hand. At any rate, they had probably practised a signature.

One other point arose from all this. The fact that a claimant had turned up in the person of a wife no longer held the importance that Mrs Bradley had at first assigned to it. She was now prepared to believe that the woman, although doubtless legally married to one of the cousins, was no more than a business associate, or, baldly, a partner in crime. Her share in the plot was to turn up at the crucial moment to claim the money. It was a business deal all round, Mrs Bradley thought. Having received her share, she would disappear again into the limbo from which she had come, unless she decided to try blackmail on whichever cousin lived to claim the money.

However, if all this were true, there could be no doubt that Tiny might have been tempted to give his cousin an overdose of aspirin before he went out into the snow. Once Bill had fallen asleep, nothing could save him in such weather.

If Tiny, therefore, were the murderer, it could not be he who had dropped the aspirin packet. The people who had access to Groaning Spinney were many, if one counted the servants and all others who worked on the estate, but it should not be difficult to find out which of the many had been through the little wood during, say, the past week.

She decided to talk to Will North again and to the Wootton brothers, and also to take counsel with the carter. Among them, these four men should be able to supply the information she wanted.

Aspirin, of course, suggested the presence of a woman. She thought she would also go up to the College and question the students. They had free access to the whole of the estate, and if one of them had dropped the packet there would be no need of further enquiries.