“Exactly. After the second murder the person is either becoming desperate or no longer has any qualms about killing. It would have been easy to finish him off. He’s often wandering on the seashore and it wouldn’t be hard to drop a rock or two on him and let the tide carry him away. We had a trickle of stones come down on us once when we stood on the beach. Rose thought that someone was up there, spying on us. We thought at the time that it was only maybe seabirds, but now I wonder . . .”

“So they arrested Belinda today. Why did you come here?”

“I couldn’t very well go on staying at Trewoma, could I? It felt so awkward as the friend of the accused. Besides, Rose’s mother arrived and I was no longer needed to provide company.”

“So you didn’t move out because you didn’t feel safe?”

“It did cross my mind that I could be in danger,” I confessed, “but then why me? I had no connection to anybody there.”

“It’s bloody cold in here.” Darcy shifted position so that we were both under the covers. “Why didn’t you go to a decent hotel?”

“I was going to stay close to Belinda in Truro,” I said, “but after old Harry was killed and then after I thought I’d seen you I wanted to stay nearby.”

There was a silence, then Darcy said, “Georgie, are you sure Belinda didn’t do it?”

“Absolutely,” I retorted. “She was taking a bath when he was killed. Actually he did come to her room earlier and try to suggest that they get back together, for old time’s sake, but she told him to get lost. So how or why he ended up naked on her bed is a complete mystery.”

“Unless someone saw him going into her room earlier and decided that it would be perfect to implicate her in his murder.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You must suspect somebody. Who else was in the house?”

“Only Rose and the servants,” I said. “Belinda’s window had been opened, so we wondered whether anyone had come in from the outside. But then how would they have managed to get a naked Tony into her room?” I paused. “I’ve been thinking, Darcy, and it has to be Rose. She likes to say that she’s not very bright, but I think she’s quite clever really. What if she has managed to pull off this whole thing?” And I went through my train of thought, from pushing Jonquil, claiming she was frightened of Tony, insisting that Belinda come to stay so she’d have a perfect setup for murder, to my own encounter with her on the cliffs and old Harry.

Darcy grunted. “It does make sense, if she had reason to believe he wanted to divorce her. But how would you ever prove any of this?”