“I am Lady Georgiana,” I said. “Formerly Rannoch but now married to Mr. O’Mara, and this is my friend Miss Belinda Warburton-Stoke.”

His gaze fastened on Belinda. “Ah, so this is the young lady in question. Miss . . . what was it again?”

“Warburton-Stoke,” she said.

“Warburton-Stoke,” he said with something like a derisive snort.

“Well, we can’t do anything about the names we were born with, Inspector,” Belinda said. Like me, her voice became tight and so posh in moments of stress.

“No, I suppose you’re right,” he agreed. “My first name is Algernon. Can’t say I like that too much.” He pulled up a chair beside us. “Now I’d like to ask a few questions, if you don’t mind?”

He seemed pleasant enough. I wondered if this was to trap us into saying something we didn’t intend to.

Belinda nodded. “This has all been such a horrible shock,” she said in a voice scarcely more than a whisper.

“So why don’t you start off by telling me how you came to be here, at this house?”

Belinda was looking down at her hands, her fingers playing with the cord of her dressing gown. “I had just inherited some property nearby. I asked my good friend Georgiana to come with me to take a look at it. It turned out to be a little fishing cottage, not suitable for us to stay in. We were in the village of Rock when we met Rose Summers. She recognized me, but I don’t think I would have recognized her. She was the daughter of my grandmother’s former cook, you see. She’d stay with her aunt all through the school year and come down to visit her mother in the summer. I used to spend my summers with my grandmother, so we used to be part of a group of young people who played together.”

“How very democratic of you,” the inspector said. “Including the cook’s daughter in your games.” The sarcasm in his voice made me realize that he wasn’t being nice at all. He wanted to catch her out.

Belinda glanced up at him and frowned. “We were children. We hadn’t yet learned to be snobs.”

He nodded. “Go on. So this girl recognized you.”

“I couldn’t believe it when she told me she was now mistress of Trewoma, and that she was married to Tony Summers. He was another boy who used to spend his summers here and we all played together. I had no idea he’d come back to this part of the world to live.”

“So you hadn’t seen any of these people since your childhood?”

Belinda shook her head. “My grandmother moved away when I was fourteen. I was sent to school in Switzerland and never came back here.”

“School in Switzerland. How nice for you.” He had the hint of a sneer on his lips.