‘So you didn’t see him again, last night or this morning?’

‘I didn’t see him …’

‘But?’

‘But I heard him. That’s right – it’s coming back to me now. He must have woken me when he got back to his room. We’d left the adjoining door open, you see, and I could hear him moving about. I remember thinking that he’d be anxious about the service. He often had trouble sleeping, especially before an important day.’

‘But you didn’t see anyone, so you can’t be sure it was him?’

‘Who else could it have been?’

‘No one,’ Marta said firmly, before Josephine could answer. ‘Of course it was your husband.’

‘Unless I dreamt it,’ Mrs Hartley said, suddenly doubting herself again. ‘I might have done. I really can’t be sure.’ She 186looked to Josephine for reassurance. ‘Did I go to look for Richard?’

‘You said you were lost on your way back from the bathroom, but your dressing gown was wet, as if you’d been out in the snow. Do you remember going out on the terrace?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps I went to the church.’

‘Is that where your husband was planning to meet someone?’ Josephine might have imagined it, but the expression that passed briefly across Angela Hartley’s face looked less like confusion than fear. ‘Is that why you went outside?’

‘I needed to give Richard his tippet before the service started. I found it in the case while I was getting dressed, and I knew he’d need it.’ She began to cry, and it would have been futile to ask anything further, even if Josephine had had the heart to. ‘This is all such a muddle,’ the vicar’s wife protested through her tears. ‘Where is Richard? Why isn’t he here to make sense of things for me?’

It was impossible to tell if the question was a symptom of the anger that so often accompanied sudden bereavement, or of Angela Hartley’s general state of mind; either way, Josephine could think of no response to the injustice of it, and was relieved to see Hilaria making her way across the terrace to take over from them. They stood helplessly by as she tried to comfort the vicar’s wife, who eventually asked to go back to her room, then headed for the dining room to join the remaining guests.

‘If there is a war, they’ll be after you for the interrogation unit,’ Marta said as they walked down the Long Passage. 187‘What was that third degree all about? Surely you don’t suspect her of killing her own husband on top of a tower in the middle of the night?’

‘Of course I don’t. That wasn’t what it seemed like, was it?’

‘A little. Carry on in that vein and you’ll make Archie look like a rookie copper on his first big case.’

Josephine smiled, in spite of the circumstances. ‘Well, I doubt that all the experience in the world will get him any further with Mrs Hartley.’