“Three are dead. No one wants to be next.”

I don’t know what answer I was expecting, but it wasn’t that one. Before I could reply, the young man darted past me and marched off down the street. What, I wondered, made him believe that there was likely to be a “next?” I thought about Poirot’s mention of a fourth cufflink, waiting in the murderer’s pocket to be placed in a future victim’s mouth, and my throat tightened involuntarily. I could not allow the possibility of another laid-out body. Palms facing downward . . .

No. That was absolutely not going to happen. Announcing this to myself made me feel better.

I walked up and down the street for a while, hoping to catch sight of someone else, but nobody appeared. I was not yet ready to return to the King’s Head, so I walked to the very end of the village where the railway station was. I stood on the platform for the London trains, frustrated that I could not board one and return home immediately. I wondered what Blanche Unsworth would cook for dinner tonight, and whether Poirot would judge it to be satisfactory. Then I forced my thoughts back in the direction of Great Holling.

What could I do if everybody in the village had resolved to avoid and ignore me?

The church! I had walked past its graveyard several times without noticing it properly—without thinking about the tragic story of the vicar and his wife who had died within hours of each other. How could I have been so oblivious?

I walked back into the village and made straight for the church. It was called Holy Saints and was a smallish building of the same honey-colored stone as the railway station. The grass in the churchyard was well tended. Most of the graves had flowers by them that appeared newly laid.

Behind the church, on the other side of a low wall into which a gate had been fitted, I saw two houses. One, set back, looked as if it must be the vicarage. The other, much smaller, was a long, low cottage, the back of which was almost pressed up against the wall. It had no back door but I counted four windows—large ones for a cottage—that would have afforded views of nothing but rows of gravestones. One would have to be made of strong stuff to live there, I thought.

I opened the iron gates and walked from the street into the churchyard. Many of the headstones were so old that the names were illegible. Just as I was thinking this, a new and rather handsome one caught my eye. It was one of the few by which no flowers were laid, and the names carved upon it made my breath catch in my throat.

It couldn’t be . . . But surely it had to be!