This has been one of the worst nights of my life. I am so worried about Belinda. I just pray that her uncle is found to be responsible and that we leave this place and go home. I just wish that Darcy was here right now. Or Granddad. Or both.

I don’t think either of us slept a wink that night. I know I didn’t. Every time I attempted to doze off, disturbing visions flashed across my mind: bloody bodies, knives, Belinda locked up in the Tower of London, Belinda being hanged. I didn’t say a word to her, just in case she had managed to fall asleep, but in the morning the bags under her eyes indicated that her night had been as awful as mine.

“I wonder when the inspector from Scotland Yard will get here,” she said as she got out of bed and went over to the window, pulling back the curtains to let gray light filter into the room. It was another morning of thick sea fog and the view was limited to ghostly shapes of the first trees. “It’s the waiting and not knowing that’s so terrible, isn’t it?”

“I know,” I said. I sat up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “I just can’t figure this out. Did Tony really come to your bedroom with no clothes on, hoping to persuade you to change your mind? Surely he risked his wife spotting him coming down the corridor. Or even one of the servants. That seems like a really reckless thing to do. Was he a reckless type of person?”

“He and Jonquil used to love to take risks when we were young,” she said. “We built a raft that came apart in the current. We climbed cliffs and got stuck once. And of course that time we tried to cross the estuary on foot at low tide and poor Colin—” She broke off.

“I’m still trying to picture this,” I said. I got up, went across to the door, opened it and peered up and down the corridor. There was no sign of life, except for the constable, now sitting on a chair at the bottom of the stairs and appearing to be asleep. I closed the door quietly again and came over to Belinda. “Was he lying on your bed so that you’d find him when you came back from your bath? And someone followed him into the room and stabbed him unexpectedly? That doesn’t make sense unless he’d fallen asleep. Wouldn’t he sit up when someone came into the room? And if it wasn’t you, wouldn’t he attempt to cover himself? There didn’t appear to be any signs of a struggle, as far as I could see. And Tony was a strong and fit man. He’d have managed to fight off most people.”