Maybe we’ve got this wrong, I thought. Maybe this is some kind of personal grudge. I knew that Prince George, for example, ran with quite a wild crowd. What if he was involved in drugs or some kind of underworld pursuit? Both of the accidents yesterday seemed to have been aimed at him. But then, there were the previous ones—the broken saddle girth on the Prince of Wales’s polo pony, the wheel that came loose on his car . . .

I broke off and shook my head. If there really was one person causing these accidents then he certainly didn’t mind taking frightful risks. How could an outsider have been able to tamper with the girth on the prince’s pony or with the wheel of his car? The answer, of course, was what Sir Jeremy suspected—not an outsider. One of us. As improbable as it seemed, someone staying at Castle Rannoch must have tampered with that loo. I went upstairs and examined it. Unfortunately there was now nothing to see. The maids had done a good job of cleaning up, and apart from the lack of a tank, the room looked perfectly ordinary. In any case it wouldn’t have been hard to have made the tank unstable enough so that a good yank on the chain would have brought it down.

I went along the hall to Binky’s bedroom. Fig was sitting with him, watching him while he ate a boiled egg. He looked up as I came in.

“Dashed funny business, Georgie,” he said. “Have you ever heard of a lavatory tank falling off the wall onto anybody?”

“Never,” I said, “but then I don’t think it was an accident that it fell. I think that maybe someone tampered with it.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I have no idea. But why would you step on a trap? Why would the rope snap when I was climbing?”

“Are you trying to say that these were all deliberate?” Fig demanded. “How utterly beastly. Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m as much in the dark as you are. None of it makes sense.”

“You don’t think those cousins of yours think that this kind of thing is funny, do you?” Fig demanded. “Remember the time they took that pig dressed up as a baby, into church, and tried to have it christened?”

“There’s a difference between high spirits and mean spiritedness,” Binky said. “Any of these accidents could have killed someone. They may have killed someone. Have we heard any news on the American woman this morning?”

“Improving, thank God. She woke up before the ambulance reached the hospital, but they are keeping her there for observation.”

“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? Will they be coming back here?”