Gertrude slapped my face. “I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time. You are so smug. Don’t want to consider adopting an orphan, but happy to rescue eight, and what? Leave them on my hands? Pity you weren’t born a boy. You could have been a fireman, rushed into burning buildings, rescued people, and left them on the pavement. Harry Aspinall liked to have his name on letterheads and do nothing. For three generations they had done nothing except live on their reputations as philanthropists. I was the one let Helen Farrar rent the shop for next to nothing, not Harry. And if you want to know who killed him, it was I. Eliot merely had the presence of mind to bash Helen Farrar on the head. It wouldn’t do to have two identical murders. And do you think either of us wanted to kill them? Do you imagine that was in our minds when we got up that morning?”

“Yes I do think that, or you wouldn’t have taken a gun. It was wilful, Gertrude. There’s no excusing it.”

“We faced bankruptcy, and saw a solution. Wouldn’t you do the same?”

Eliot let go of my wrist. “She wouldn’t do it, but only because she doesn’t know what it means to be on the edge. She is a nothing-ventured kind of person.”

They were talking about me as if I were not here, as if I were already beyond troubling them. “I’m not alone. There are two men with me.” Alec wasn’t quite sixteen but I could stretch a point.

Eliot went to the window again. From what he said, I realised there was no sign of Sykes and Alec. “I’m surprised you got yourself another Jowett, so soon after the last one let you down.”

He reached for Gertrude’s hand. “Come on. Leave her. No one believes her story. We’ll say we never saw her, had already left. Oh and before you think of telephoning for help, the telephone has been disconnected.”

Gertrude sighed. “Eliot, dear, Kate will never give up. It’s typical of her to barge into someone’s house, not because she should but because she can.”

“What then, Gertie?”

“Nothing serious. Just a fall down the cellar steps, fatal of course. We never even knew she’d come into the house. We had business in London, gave the servants a week’s holiday. When the house is open again, you’ll have no idea why her car is outside, and how she got in.”

As if he couldn’t resist his moment of triumph, Eliot said, “And we don’t want to miss our train. Investors are falling over themselves to buy shares.”

“And will you let Stephen Walmsley be hanged for murder?”

“Possibly for two murders.”