‘How far did you get?’ Rosalind asked.

‘Not very,’ Posy admitted.

‘It’s too complicated.’ Caro dropped into one of the leather armchairs. ‘It’s getting like that awful fifties book, the one in eight parts that doesn’t make any sense until the last page.’

‘Forever Summer,’ Rosalind supplied. ‘Nobody liked that one. It was Letty getting experimental.’

‘I preferred the one she wrote from Johnnie’s point of view,’ Caro grumbled. ‘To Catch A Fly. That was good experimental.’

‘Let’s go back to basics,’ Posy said. ‘What would Dahlia do?’

‘She’d figure out the facts in hand,’ Caro replied. ‘That’s something we haven’t done – looked at the facts of Clementine’s death.’

‘Because we don’t know them.’ Caro glared at Posy, and she rolled her eyes before continuing. ‘Okay, fine. We know that she was pretending to be dead in the stables before three o’clock on Saturday, because I saw her there. And we know she drove away from Aldermere just after five, because we all saw her do that. And we know that she showed up dead in the reeds at midnight the next day, and had been dead over twenty-four hours, so she probably died before Marcus was murdered.’

‘We can also assume she came back at some point between those last two events,’ Rosalind said. ‘If Felicity is telling the truth about seeing her that afternoon.’

‘And left her clothes in the Gate House, where I found them,’ Caro added. ‘But why pretend to leave then come back and hide if it wasn’t to kill Marcus? And what happened to the clothes she put on instead? Unless the killer stripped her then hid her clothes there?’

Another thing that didn’t make any sense.

‘Caro, tell us again what happened at the Gate House last night.’ There had to be a clue in there somewhere, but for the life of her, Rosalind couldn’t see what it was.

‘I told you. I went in to search the bedroom. I opened the drawer under the wardrobe, and I saw Clementine’s clothes.’

‘How did you know they were Clementine’s?’ Posy had a pen in hand and was scribbling notes.

Caro shrugged. ‘I recognised that mustard scarf she was wearing when we met her. Anyway, I went to pull them out and someone whacked me over the head and everything went black.’

‘Where did the attacker come from, though?’ Rosalind wondered aloud. ‘They couldn’t have been in the room when you came in, and no one went past Posy and I to get to the bedroom. The window was open?’

‘Yes. But I don’t think they came through it.’ Caro frowned, as if trying to remember. ‘I think … she must have been behind the door when I entered.’

‘Which means she was already in the Gate House before we got there.’ Posy dropped her pen and looked up. ‘Wait. It was definitely a woman?’