The smell of hot coffee pervaded the house, seeming to intensify. Why had he ever found it comforting? He wondered if he would ever again smell it without a pang of remembered failure. Familiar faces had become those of strangers, carved faces like those of patients enduring unexpected pain, funereal faces seeming as unnaturally solemn as mourners composing themselves appropriately for the obsequies of someone little known, unregretted, but taking on in death a terrifying power. Flavia’s bloated face, the swollen eyelids, eyes dulled by tears. Yet he hadn’t actually seen her cry, and the only words he could remember her speaking had struck him as irritatingly irrelevant.

“You did a beautiful job. Now she’ll never see it, and she’d waited so long. All that time and skill wasted, just wasted.”

They had both lost a patient, the only death which had occurred in his clinic at the Manor. Were her tears the tears of frustration or failure? They could hardly, surely, be of grief.

And now he would have to deal with the Bostocks. He must face their demands for reassurance, comfort, decisions on matters which would seem irrelevant but which wouldn’t be irrelevant to them. He had said all that was necessary at that meeting at eight-fifteen in the library. There at least he had taken responsibility. He had set out to be brief and he had been brief. His voice had been calm, authoritative. They would all have learnt by now of the tragedy that would touch their lives. Miss Rhoda Gradwyn had been found dead in her room at seven-thirty this morning. There was some evidence that the death had been unnatural. Well, he thought, that was one way of putting it. The police had been phoned, and a chief inspector from the local constabulary was on his way. Naturally they would all co-operate with police enquiries. In the meantime, they should stay calm, refrain from gossip or speculation and get on with their work. What work exactly? he wondered. Mrs. Skeffington’s operation had been cancelled. The anaesthetist and theatre staff had been telephoned; Flavia and Helena between them had coped with that. And after this brief speech, avoiding questions, he had left the library. But hadn’t that exit, all eyes on him, been a histrionic gesture, a deliberate avoidance of responsibility? He remembered standing for a moment outside the door, like a stranger in the house, wondering where to go.

And now, seated at the kitchen table with Dean and Kimberley, he was expected to concern himself with pea soup and soda bread. From the moment of entering a room which he seldom had need to visit, he felt as inept as an intruder. What reassurance, what comfort were they expecting from him? The two faces confronting his were those of frightened children, seeking the answer to a question that had nothing to do with bread or soup.