“We just go for a small walk. English people need fresh air,” Darcy replied. So having decided we were mad English people, he opened a small door beside the big gates and we stepped through into the outside world. Pristine snow stretched before us. The boughs of the fir trees were bent heavy with snow and every now and then there was a soft whoosh and thud as snow slid off to the ground below. It was so bright that it was dazzling. Darcy took my hand and we crunched across the snow, keeping to the tracks the motorcars had made until we were among the trees at the base of the great crag on which the castle stood. An icy blast whistled down from the pass, freezing my nose and ears. The silence was absolute, except for the rattle of a dead branch in the wind.

“This is nice,” I said, my breathing hanging like smoke in the chill air. “Nice but cold.”

“I wanted to talk to you away from prying eyes and ears,” Darcy said. “I wanted to sound you out on Pirin’s death. Nicholas’s parents arrived this morning. His father will want to know the truth sometime. Nicholas can’t keep on pretending forever, and I’d like to have found out who might have killed Pirin before then, so that hopefully an international incident can be averted.”

I nodded.

“You must have some ideas on the subject,” he said.

“Actually I don’t,” I said. “I was sitting opposite him at dinner. And I don’t see how he could have been poisoned. The only people who came anywhere near him were servers and Dragomir. The servers put food from the same platter on everyone’s plate, and as for wine, well, the rate he was drinking it, his glass was being constantly refilled.”

“You saw it being refilled, did you?”

“Yes, I did. From the same carafe as everyone else.”

Darcy frowned. “Cyanide takes effect almost instantly,” he said, “so it’s unlikely to have been in the food because he’d cleaned his plate pretty well. Unfortunately he knocked over and spilled the remnants of his wine when he collapsed, but there doesn’t seem to be any residue in his glass.”

“Is it possible to put cyanide into some kind of capsule, so that it wouldn’t work on the system until it was digested?”

Darcy nodded. “Possible, I suppose, but at the rate he was chomping and drinking, it seems likely he would have bitten through a capsule much earlier.”

I nodded. “I suppose he would.”

“Baffling,” Darcy said. “Well, now that the pass is open I can send out the utensils to the nearest laboratory for testing and perhaps we’ll know where the cyanide was hidden. But that still brings us to motive.”

“Oh, I can think of a lot of people who’d want Pirin dead,” I said.

“Can you?” He looked at me sharply.