Caro nodded, slowly. ‘I’m pretty sure. I couldn’t get a good look at her in the dark – I dropped my torch. But she didn’t feel like a man. You know? You can tell, can’t you, when the threat is male.’

The strangest thing was, Rosalind knew exactly what she meant.

‘So we need to figure out which of the women could have been in the Gate House at midnight to whack Caro over the head, then we’ve got our killer.’ Posy grabbed her pen again. ‘So that’s Heather, Libby, Isobel, Juliette and Felicity. Anyone else?’ Caro and Rosalind shook their heads. ‘That’s five women we need to talk to, get their alibis for midnight last night.’

Rosalind’s mouth felt dry. Even if it was a woman in the Gate House, she wasn’t willing to write off the involvement of all the male occupants of Aldermere just yet.

‘You two handle that,’ she said.

Isobel was still in the entrance hall, talking with her housekeeper, but she paused to tell Rosalind, ‘Hugh’s in Letty’s study, if you’re looking for him.’

Rosalind nodded, and was rewarded with a relieved smile from her friend.

She lingered at the dollhouse at the bottom of the stairs, postponing the moment of seeing him again, painfully aware of how different this felt to even three days ago. When she’d found him there on Friday night, even after what Isobel had told her, she’d wanted to be in his arms.

Now, she was almost afraid of what happened next.

She peered closer into the replica of Aldermere, and spotted another figure, this time in Letty’s study. Her fingers moved towards it without thinking, lifting it out and holding it up to the light.

To her surprise, it was a man. Not me. Then she registered the grey hair, the cord trousers, and the bottle of poison clutched in its hand.

Hugh.

Maybe it had been left for her, after all.

The figure still clenched in her fingers, Rosalind climbed the stairs to the first floor, then the second, narrower staircase to the attic floor, and Letty’s study. She could feel her heart thumping too fast in her chest, as if her body were preparing itself for another shock.

She pushed open the door, and found Hugh sprawled over the armchair beside the bookcase reading one of Letty’s earlier mysteries. Hugh had always said his aunt’s books were comfort reads for him. ‘It feels like she’s talking to me, even now she’s gone,’ he’d told her, when she visited for Letty’s funeral and found him in the same place.

Rosalind cleared her throat, and Hugh looked up, his face brightening under the anglepoise floor lamp behind him. ‘Well, this is a nice surprise. Managed to break away from your sycophants, did you?’