They found a parking space some hundred yards from Absolution Alley; Dalgliesh gave a final glance at the map and took his murder bag from the car and they set off eastwards. The narrow cobbled entrance under a stone arch, discordantly ornate for such a narrow opening, would have been easy to miss. The paved courtyard, lit by two wall mounted lamps, which merely illumined a Dickensian gloom, was small, with a centre plinth supporting an age-crumbled statue, possibly of antiquated religious significance but now no more than a shapeless mass of stone. Number 8 was on the eastern side, the door painted a green so dark that it looked almost black and with an iron knocker in the shape of an owl. Next to number 8 was a shop which sold old prints, with a wooden display tray outside, now empty. A second building was obviously a select employment agency but gave no sign of the type of workers it hoped to attract. Other doors bore small polished plaques with unfamiliar names. The silence was absolute.

The door had been fitted with two security locks, but there was no problem in selecting the right keys from Miss Gradwyn’s bunch, and the door opened easily. Dalgliesh put out his hand and found the light switch. They entered a small room, oak-panelled and with an ornate plaster ceiling incorporating the date: 1684. A mullioned window at the rear gave a view of a paved patio with room for little more than a leaf-denuded tree in an immense terra-cotta pot. There was a row of coat hooks to the right with a shelf beneath for shoes, and on the left a rectangular oak table. It held four envelopes, clearly either bills or catalogues, which Dalgliesh thought had probably arrived before Miss Gradwyn left on Thursday for the Manor and which she had judged could well await her return. The only picture was a small oil painting of a seventeenth-century man with a long sensitive face, which hung above the stone fireplace, and which Dalgliesh, on first scrutiny, thought was a copy of the well-known portrait of John Donne. He switched on the strip of lighting fixed to shine on the portrait and studied it for a moment in silence. Hanging alone in a room which was a place of passage, it acquired an iconic power, perhaps as the presiding genius of the home. Switching off the light, Dalgliesh wondered if that was how Rhoda Gradwyn had seen it.