“Nonsense.” Pat pushed past him and regretted it almost at once, since the atmosphere was much as one might expect with an unwashed day-old corpse at the table. She stopped breathing through her nose after the first inhalation, but she couldn’t close her eyes.

Haworth lay over the desk, knife-handle still jutting obscenely. His hand on the desk was clawlike and livid, though the position of his arms suggested the rigor had passed. She was glad she couldn’t see his face.

She approached, legs feeling oddly reluctant. He looked very dead, but still human in his slumped posture, like a thing that slept. If he stood now, if he leapt from the table and turned to her—

What self-indulgent silliness. It was only a body. She clenched her fists and peered over the dead man’s shoulder.

“What are we looking at?” Bill asked adenoidally, since he was also breathing through his mouth.

Pat pointed at the playing cards scattered over the table. “Does that look like two packs’ worth to you?”

Bill frowned. “Not unless he’s lying on most of them. Why would you say— Good Lord!”

Pat nodded. Bill took a pencil from his pocket and used it to lift one card, then another, squinting underneath. “They’ve all got the same design on the back.”

“One pack of cards, but two aces of hearts,” Pat said. “I saw it yesterday, you know. The red aces looked like drops of blood on the table, and there were three of them, drip drip drip. I saw it but it didn’t sink in, somehow, what with the corpse.”

“You can be forgiven for that,” Bill said. “A spare ace of hearts. An ace in the hole. That would be an opening for blackmail if ever there was one, when one’s victim lives entirely by gambling.”

“Does he?” Pat asked.

Bill made a face. “He’s a clubman with no visible means of support except for that remarkable knack at cards. If Haworth exposed him as a cheat he’d be expelled from his clubs, which would put paid both to his career as a gamester, and to the invitations to house parties. He’d be ruined. I think Lady Anna will need to be more specific about the time he spent with her.”

“Footsteps past my bedroom,” Pat said. “If Jack took the knife from the wall, and followed Haworth after a few moments, if he killed him and then took the back corridor to Lady Anna’s bedroom—that fits, doesn’t it?”

Bill winced. “Was there a plan between them, or do you think he acted alone?”

“I’d guess the latter, or they would have had their alibis aligned in advance.” Pat imagined what it might feel like to have a lover’s tryst and afterwards discover that your lover had just murdered your husband. “This won’t be pleasant for her.”

“Not awfully, no.”