Perhaps because the group interrogation in the library was a fresh and unpleasant memory, the suspects, as if by unspoken agreement, avoided open discussion of the murder, but Lettie knew that they spoke of it privately—herself and Helena, the Bostocks in the kitchen, which they had always regarded as their home but now saw as a refuge, and, she assumed, the Westhalls in Stone Cottage. Only Flavia and Sharon seemed to distance themselves from the others and kept their silence, Flavia busying herself with unspecified jobs in the operating suite, Sharon seeming to regress to a moody monosyllabic teenager. Mog moved between them distributing pieces of gossip and theory like alms into outstretched hands. Without any formal meeting or agreed strategy, it seemed to Lettie that a common theory was emerging which only the most sceptical found unconvincing, and they were holding their peace.

Obviously the murder was an outside job and Rhoda Gradwyn herself had let her killer into the Manor, the date and time probably by prior agreement before she left London. That was why she had been so adamant that no visitors should be admitted. She was, after all, a notorious investigative journalist. She must have made enemies. The car seen by Mog was probably the killer’s, and the light glimpsed at the stones by Mrs. Skeffington was his waving torch. The bolted door next morning was a difficulty, but the murderer could have bolted the door himself after the deed and then hidden himself in the Manor until the door was unbolted next morning by Chandler-Powell. There had, after all, been only a superficial search of the Manor before the police arrived. Had anyone, for example, searched the four empty suites in the west wing? And there were plenty of cupboards in the Manor large enough to contain a man. It was perfectly possible for an intruder to be undetected. He could have made his exit unnoticed by the west door and escaped down the lime walk to the field while the whole household was immured in the north-facing library being interrogated by Commander Dalgliesh. If the police hadn’t been so anxious to concentrate on the household, the killer might have been caught by now.