The rest of the afternoon was occupied with the individual interviews, most of them taking place in the library. Helena Cressett was the last of the household to be seen, and Dalgliesh had given the task to Kate and Benton. He sensed that Miss Cressett expected him to do the questioning, and he needed her to know that he headed a team, and that both his junior officers were competent. Surprisingly, she invited Kate and Benton to join her in her private flat in the east wing. The room into which she led them was obviously her sitting room but in its elegance and richness was hardly the accommodation a housekeeper-administrator would expect to occupy. The furnishings and the placing of the pictures revealed a highly individual taste, and although the room wasn’t exactly cluttered, there was a suggestion of valued objects being brought together more for the satisfaction of the owner than as part of a coherent decorative plan. It was, thought Benton, as if Helena Cressett had colonised part of the Manor for her private domain. Here was none of the dark solidity of Tudor furniture. Apart from the sofa, covered in cream linen and piped with red, which stood at right angles to the fireplace, most of the furniture was Georgian.

Nearly all the pictures on the panelled walls were family portraits, and Miss Cressett’s resemblance to them was unmistakable. None seemed to him particularly fine—perhaps those had been sold separately—but all had a striking individuality and were competently painted, some more than competently. Here a Victorian bishop in his lawn sleeves gazed at the painter with ecclesiastical hauteur belied by a suspicion of unease, as if the book on which his palm rested was The Origin of Species. Next to him a seventeenth-century Cavalier, hand on sword, posed with unashamed arrogance, while, over the mantelpiece, an early-Victorian family was grouped in front of the house, the ringleted mother with her younger children gathered about her, the eldest boy mounted on a pony, the father at their side. And always there were the high arched brows above the eyes, the dominant cheekbones, the full curve of the upper lip.

Benton said, “You’re among your ancestors, Miss Cressett. The resemblance is striking.”

Neither Dalgliesh nor Kate would have said that—it was maladroit and could be unwise to begin an interview with a personal comment—and, although Kate was silent, Benton felt her surprise. But he quickly justified to himself a remark which had been spontaneous by reflecting that it would probably prove useful. They needed to know the woman they were dealing with and, more precisely, her status at the Manor, how far she was in control and how strong her influence on Chandler-Powell and the other residents. Her response to what she might see as a minor impertinence could be revealing.