Even as she spoke to Miss Pennington, there was another voice in Mrs. Sugden’s head. This voice told her that the shopkeeper might not have been murdered for her paltry takings. She might have been murdered because she knew something.

Did she and Harriet now know that very same thing?

A man in expensive clothes had been shot.

Chapter 41

Chapter Forty-One

Mrs. Dell’s house would not have been out of place on the Rhine, or in a child’s picture book. The storeys on either end were topped with turrets that came to a point like witches’ hats. The imposing front door might have led to a Parisian courtyard.

I admired the design as I helped Mrs. Dell from the car, which I had parked close to the front door.

“We planned it ourselves, my late husband and I. He was an engineer but had a fancy to be an architect. You will come in?”

We entered a baroque hall, large enough to stage a concert. A broad staircase with barley sugar rails led to a gallery. Mrs. Dell’s walking stick tap-tapped as I followed her along the hall and through a door. “I live entirely downstairs now.” A corridor led to a comfortable sitting room. Beyond the bay windows were three tall poplar trees. A low fire burned in the grate.

“Do sit down, Mrs. Shackleton. I suppose we ought to take off our coats but I feel the cold these days.”

I had not meant to come in, but it would have been churlish to refuse.

She rang a bell. Sykes’s note was burning a hole in my pocket. I pictured him waiting in the White Swan, ordering another pint, looking at his watch. Would the stranger, Mr. Aspinall’s son, be with him?

Mrs. Dell wanted to talk. “If the rains had not turned tropical, I should have visited my daughter-in-law’s grave. We thought a lot of each other, Phyllis and I. She was more of a daughter to me than Eliot has ever been a son.”

“Then I’m sorry for your loss. Perhaps you will visit the grave another day.”

“That may not be possible. Thank you for your condolences. You see, she ought to have been alive.”

“Gertrude told me of the circumstances.”

“You mean that she repeated Eliot’s story?”

The maid came at that moment. She wheeled a trolley with tea things, sandwiches and plates. A stout, motherly sort of woman, she made sure that Mrs. Dell’s cushions were in place and her spectacles handy. She spoke to her mistress in a friendly familiar way. “I didn’t know if you’d go back to the Brockmans for the funeral breakfast.”

“I can’t be doing with it, Maggie. And I didn’t want to delay.”

Neither did I want to delay, but here I was. Sykes would know that parting company after a funeral would not be easy.