She watched the young man closely as she made this statement. Emming went crimson and his eyes blazed. He stood threateningly over the small, black-eyed woman.

‘You can take that back!’ he cried furiously. ‘She would never have done such a thing!’

‘Don’t loom,’ said Mrs Bradley composedly. ‘Even if you did strike me it wouldn’t help matters. It would not even give you satisfaction. I did not invent this information, you know. It can be proved. I’m afraid you must accept that as a fact.’

The young man sat down. He looked tired. The colour ebbed from his face and neck, and he shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

‘Please go on,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. She … she had a lot to put up with, you know.’

‘I’m sorry, too,’ said Mrs Bradley gently. ‘Now I don’t know whether you have ever examined the theory that her death may not have been an accident? The verdict of the inquest, you know …’

‘I … you mean … you think she may have …?’

‘Not even that,’ said Mrs Bradley, speaking very quietly. ‘I think she may have let somebody know that she had stumbled on an ugly bit of truth. So you see why I want to find out about those anonymous letters. We know she wrote the one which went to my nephew. That has been proved. It also seems likely that she wrote one to Miss Hughes at the College. If she wrote two, she most likely wrote others of which we have never known because they exposed dark secrets, criminal ones, perhaps.’

‘Yes, I see.’ He walked to the window. Mrs Bradley half-turned in her chair and regarded his thin shoulders and narrow back appraisingly. He swung round. ‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t, even if I could. She would never have told me anything about such a thing. I’m her son, as, of course, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know. A mother would hardly confide to her son that she was the author of anonymous filth.’

She walked to the door. The young man swung round and sped her departing presence with an oath. Mrs Bradley turned on him.

‘I should be careful how I used that word,’ she said mildly. ‘It has appeared in two of the typewritten letters. You don’t possess a typewriter, I suppose?’

Emming followed her to the door and watched until she was lost to sight at a bend in the road.

She passed under the bridge which carried the drive from Jonathan’s house to the College, and then struck up through the lane to Will North’s place. But it was not Will she had come to see. Her business was with the brothers Wootton, who lived in the opposite house.