“Don’t distress yourself, my dear,” the Earl told her, looking more focused now he had a task. Fen took his arm, and a fair bit of his weight, and they proceeded out.

Bill’s shoulders relaxed slightly. “Thank God he’s gone. Come here, old thing, I need some common sense. How long would you say he’s been dead?”

Pat had laid out four bodies in her time: her father, a kitchen-maid who had died of appendicitis, and two neighbours. It was more experience with corpses than she supposed Bill had. She approached, feeling as weirdly slow as a woman in a nightmare.

The knife jutted from Haworth’s back, obscene and wrong, surrounded by a small dark stain. He lay over the desk, face down in a litter of playing cards, black and red. The aces were a scattering of blood-drops, lone and garish against their white backgrounds, as if marked by a steady drip, drip, drip.

His hair was still swept back, kept in place by pomade. That was the most horrifying thing of all because he had combed it this morning, made it perfect, and its orderly arrangement had not slipped even when the knife brought fatal disorder to his suit, his back, his life.

“There isn’t very much blood,” she said, and was pleased to find her voice steady.

“The knife went in deep. I suppose he must have died at once. Or all the bleeding is internal. What about the time, do you think?”

Haworth’s neck was cold to Pat’s touch, and stiff. She pulled at his arm and felt the resistance. “Rigor has set in solidly. That means he must have been dead at least six hours.”

“It’s half past nine now. So he was definitely dead by mid-afternoon. But he could presumably have been killed well before then?”

Pat opened her mouth in instinctive revulsion at been killed, and shut it again. The knife protruding from his back didn’t leave much room for debate. “Yes. He must have died before, let’s say four o’clock at the very latest. Fen and I saw him at half past eleven, going into the East Wing—that was just after we left you. So it was between those times. Nobody else saw him after I did.”

“Nobody else has admitted to seeing him, you mean,” Bill said. “We’re going to need the police.”

“We’re not going to get them tonight.”

They looked at one another, then both turned sharply as someone entered. It was Jimmy, with a glass of whisky in each hand.

“Hello,” Bill said. “I thought you were keeping out the madding crowds.”

“Jack’s doing that. I’ve told everyone to have a stiff drink, thought you might need one. Sorry, Pat, I didn’t realise—”