“Lady Georgiana,” he said. “You’re still here. I do wish you’d take my advice and go home.”

“I’m not leaving until my friend has been proven innocent,” I said.

“As to that . . .” He paused, frowning at Belinda. “Interesting development.”

I thought he was going to say what Belinda feared—that the police had contacted Tony’s London friends and someone remembered his affair with Belinda. But instead he said, “They’ve just concluded the autopsy on the dead man, and it seems that someone tried to drown him. Remember he had wet hair? Well, he also had water in his lungs. Not enough to have killed him, according to the police surgeon, but maybe to have rendered him unconscious.”

“Well, that lets Miss Warburton-Stoke off the hook, doesn’t it?” I said.

“How do you figure that, Lady Georgiana? The lady has confessed herself that she was taking a bath. So I’m thinking, knowing what these aristocrats get up to, what if they were in the bathtub together . . . what if things got . . . rather playful and she saw her chance to hold his head under the water?”

“But you still believe that he was stabbed on the bed and not transported from the bathroom already dead?” I asked.

“From the amount of blood on the bed I’d say he was alive and stabbed there,” he said.

“Presumably you’d be able to check the bathroom for microscopic amounts of blood that had not been wiped away to confirm this?”

“We could do so, certainly, but I’ve seen stab wounds before. And if he’d been stabbed in the bathroom we’d also find blood in the corridor. My men did check that out.”

“So what you are saying,” I began carefully, making sure I presented this perfectly, “is that my friend, having half killed Mr. Summers while in the bathtub with him, decided not to finish him off there and make it look like an accident but dragged him the length of the hall and stabbed him in dramatic fashion on her bed, thus implicating herself and nobody else?” I paused. “Really, Inspector!” I laughed. “Any defense lawyer would make mincemeat of that.”

His face had gone rather red. “Put like that you do have a point. I suppose the whole thing comes down to how easy it would have been to get him down that corridor. It’s a long way from the nearest bathroom.”

“It certainly is,” I said. “But I think I might be able to help you.” And I told him what I had observed about the wagon, also about the wet towel on the bonfire. “I think someone might have thrown them out of the window to be retrieved later,” I said.

“Since you have been doing a bit of deducing and snooping,” he said, “who do you think might be responsible if it is not your friend?”