Caro always knew she should have done more directing. She clearly had a natural talent for it.

‘I’m saying we need to put them back where they came from.’

Caro left Rosalind to distract Hugh, and Posy standing guard in her bedroom with the door open, keeping an eye on the stairs to Lettice’s study, while she returned the stolen items.

She crept up the stairs, praying they wouldn’t creak too much, and turned the handle to the study, easing the door open to check that it was empty before she entered. The last thing she needed was someone catching her with a priceless jewelled magnifying glass stuffed in her bra and a poison bottle in her hand.

She was in luck; the study was empty. She pressed the door shut behind her, then leant against it. Strange to think that this was the place where Dahlia Lively had sprung into existence. Lettice had moved to London in her late teens, precocious as ever, moving in literary circles and selling her first novel at the age of nineteen. But the germ of it, that character, had first come to her in this attic room, according to her later interviews.

Caro’s gaze fell on the desk in the centre of the room, in front of the window, as she imagined Lettice sitting there, dreaming up new challenges for Dahlia Lively and her friends.

‘You’d have liked this one,’ she murmured to herself, or maybe to Lettice. She wasn’t sure.

She placed the poison bottle back on the shelf, then hurried to the glass cabinet where the magnifying glass had been kept. A shadowy outline on the felt showed where it belonged, the way that objects that remained long in one place left imprints even in their absence.

Caro fished the magnifying glass out of her bra and returned it to its place. Then she looked again, frowning.

It didn’t fit.

It sat nicely enough against the felt, but its shape didn’t quite match the outline left behind. The handle was a fraction too short, and the glass a few millimetres too big. It could have been some quirk of the storage, but instinct told Caro that wasn’t it.

The same instinct that reminded her of Marcus’s ledger in her other pocket.

Caro dropped into the desk chair, pulled out the little leather notebook and flicked through it. She’d have to be quick, but hopefully Posy would distract anyone heading up here. And Caro had a feeling this was going to be important.

It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for – what her detective’s intuition told her must be there. Three months earlier, an entry marked Aldermere in Marcus’s cursive hand. Jewellers Loupe belonging to Lettice Davenport. And beside it was the amount it was bought for – significant – and the amount sold for – significantly more.