Kim said, “But I don’t think Mog has gone for the fresh bread. Mr. Chandler-Powell said that we ought to stay here.”

“We could make some soda bread, that’s always popular.”

“What about the police—will we have to feed them? You said you didn’t feed Chief Inspector Whetstone when he arrived, except for coffee, but this new lot are coming from London. They’ll have had a long drive.”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Mr. Chandler-Powell.”

And then Kim remembered. How odd, she thought, that she had forgotten. She said, “It was today we were going to tell him about the baby, after Mrs. Skeffington’s operation. Now they know, and they don’t seem worried. Miss Cressett says there’s plenty of room in the Manor for a baby.”

Kim thought she detected a small note of impatience, even of subdued satisfaction, in Dean’s voice. He said, “It’s no good deciding whether we want to stay on here with the baby when we don’t even know if the clinic can continue. Who’d want to come here now? Would you want to sleep in that room?”

Glancing at him, Kim saw his features momentarily harden as if in resolution. And then the door opened, and they turned to face Mr. Chandler-Powell.

Chapter 5

5

Glancing at his watch, Chandler-Powell saw that it was one-forty. Perhaps he should now have a word with the Bostocks, who were closeted in the kitchen. He needed to check again that Kimberley had fully recovered and that they were giving thought to food. No one had yet eaten. The six hours since the murder was discovered had seemed an eternity in which small unrelated events were recalled with clarity in a waste of unrecorded time. Sealing the murder room as Chief Inspector Whetstone had instructed; finding the widest roll of Sellotape in the recesses of his desk; forgetting to seal the end, so that it sprang back and the roll became unusable; Helena taking it from him and coping; at her suggestion, initialling the tape to ensure that it wasn’t tampered with. He had no awareness of the growing of the light, of utter darkness becoming a grey winter morning, of the occasional gusts of the dying wind like erratic gunfire. Despite the blips of memory, the confusion of time, he was confident that he had done what was expected of him—coping with Mrs. Skeffington’s hysteria, examining Kimberley Bostock and giving directions for her care, trying to keep everyone calm, waiting interminably until the local police arrived.