“Including my uncle? I wonder if he was taken completely by surprise,” Belinda answered. “Do you think the local police have managed to chase up Uncle Francis? I do hope he hasn’t sailed off to the Continent already.”

“We can just hope they find his fingerprints in an incriminating place,” I said, “because if it wasn’t him, then it was someone else in this house.”

“I know.” She gave a shuddering sigh. “I keep wondering if it was really Rose. She was the only one with a good motive to get rid of Tony, wasn’t she? If she really thought he was trying to kill her, then why not kill him first, as you said? And my arrival was perfect timing for her, wasn’t it? She invites us here and then kills him in my room so that someone else is blamed for the murder. I always thought she was not too bright but she might be deeper than we know. This was a stroke of genius.”

“I don’t see how it could have been Rose,” I said. “It’s a long way from the kitchen. Unless she had only pretended to make cocoa and was spying on Tony all the time, waiting for the right moment to strike. She watches him go into your room, realizes this is her chance and catches him unawares. Then she dashes down again and makes her cocoa.

“The only thing against that was that she didn’t seem at all out of breath when she appeared at the bottom of the stairs carrying that cocoa mug. You’d have thought rushing upstairs, stabbing someone and dashing down again, all the way to the kitchen and back, would leave her a little breathless. And she’d also have had to go and find the dagger in the first place. She wouldn’t exactly carry a large dagger around with her, just in case she got a good opportunity to stab him.”

Belinda had to smile at this. “I see your point. And she did sound genuinely shocked, didn’t she? And angry. Perhaps she really loved him.”

“The worrying part is that if it wasn’t Rose, then who? The servants had gone to bed. Let’s hope the police check into each of their backgrounds. There might be one of them whose family has been cheated out of mooring rights or lobster rights or something. But surely no servant would risk carrying out a murder in one of the bedrooms. They’d follow him around the property and kill him where nobody could see and probably wouldn’t find the body for days.”

Belinda nodded. “The only other person who was up and around was Mrs. Mannering.”