“Cousins? Not a nephew and niece?”

“No. They call me Aunt Letty, but actually they are distant cousins. Their mother was my second cousin.”

“Have they always made their home with you?”

“Oh, dear no, only for the last two months. They lived in the South of France before the war. Patrick went into the Navy and Julia, I believe, was in one of the Ministries. She was at Llandudno. When the war was over their mother wrote and asked me if they could possibly come to me as paying guests—Julia is training as a dispenser in Milchester General Hospital, Patrick is studying for an engineering degree at Milchester University. Milchester, as you know, is only fifty minutes by bus, and I was very glad to have them here. This house is really too large for me. They pay a small sum for board and lodging and it all works out very well.” She added with a smile, “I like having somebody young about the place.”

“Then there is a Mrs. Haymes, I believe?”

“Yes. She works as an assistant gardener at Dayas Hall, Mrs. Lucas’s place. The cottage there is occupied by the old gardener and his wife and Mrs. Lucas asked if I could billet her here. She’s a very nice girl. Her husband was killed in Italy, and she has a boy of eight who is at a prep school and whom I have arranged to have here in the holidays.”

“And by way of domestic help?”

“A jobbing gardener comes in on Tuesdays and Fridays. A Mrs. Huggins from the village comes up five mornings a week and I have a foreign refugee with a most unpronouncable name as a kind of lady cook help. You will find Mitzi rather difficult, I’m afraid. She has a kind of persecution mania.”

Craddock nodded. He was conscious in his own mind of yet another of Constable Legg’s invaluable commentaries. Having appended the word “Scatty” to Dora Bunner, and “All right” to Letitia Blacklock, he had embellished Mitzi’s record with the one word “Liar.”

As though she had read his mind Miss Blacklock said:

“Please don’t be too prejudiced against the poor thing because she’s a liar. I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies. I mean that though, to take an instance, her atrocity stories have grown and grown until every kind of unpleasant story that has ever appeared in print has happened to her or her relations personally, she did have a bad shock initially and did see one, at least, of her relations killed. I think a lot of these displaced persons feel, perhaps justly, that their claim to our notice and sympathy lies in their atrocity value and so they exaggerate and invent.”

She added: “Quite frankly, Mitzi is a maddening person. She exasperates and infuriates us all, she is suspicious and sulky, is perpetually having ‘feelings’ and thinking herself insulted. But in spite of it all, I really am sorry for her.” She smiled. “And also, when she wants to, she can cook very nicely.”