Maria shook her head. “No, senorita. She locked up in one of the rooms upstairs. Locked up like a common criminal. I ask you. They think she killed Mr. Goldman but that’s stupid. She wouldn’t have done that. She loved him. One of those men came down and said Miss Brightwell wanted toast and tea, so I fix it for her. Now I’m waiting for him to come back to take the tray up to her.” She indicated the table.

“I’ll take it,” I said eagerly. “We don’t want the toast and tea to get cold, do we?”

“Muchas gracias, senorita,” she said, smiling shyly. “I would have taken it myself but these old legs are not good on the stairs no more.”

“It’s no problem.” I picked up the tray. “Which room is it?”

“It’s in that corridor to the left, second door toward the back of the house. You can’t miss it because it looks like the door from another of those old churches.”

I picked up the tray and went carefully up the stairs. I noticed then for the first time that each of the rooms had a different door, taken from some old building. This one was particularly solid and impressive, which was presumably why they had chosen to keep Stella shut in there. I kicked at the door with my foot and it was opened by one of the sheriff’s men, looking even more rough and haggard after a sleepless night.

“I’ve brought up Miss Brightwell’s tray,” I said.

“How kind of you, Georgie,” Stella said as I carried it into the room before he could take it from me. In contrast to her unshaven, unkempt guard, Stella still looked perfectly groomed. She was sitting in a high-backed armchair, wearing a black silk dressing gown trimmed with white feathers.

“There’s no news, I take it,” she said as I put the tray in front of her. She sighed. “I thought not. That horrid man has decided that I’m guilty and he’s not even going to keep looking, is he?”

“We’ll do our best to help,” I said. “But it’s not easy when the murderer must be one of us. You said that you suspected Mrs. Goldman.”

She glanced across at her guard, standing in the doorway watching us with a rather large weapon on the table beside him. “Of course I do,” she said. “She was the only one of us with means and motive, wasn’t she? She said she went up to bed, but did anyone see her actually go up the stairs? And that poisonous Barbara Kindell might well be in it with her. They probably plotted together. Helen Goldman knew that Cy wanted to divorce her and marry me and he was going to cite denial of conjugal rights. Why else would she have come back here? She hates the place.”