‘The investigators will be here soon.’ Shading his eyes with his hand, Kit looked towards the house, but the path they’d followed was empty for now. ‘I guess we’d better get in position.’

‘Guess so.’

‘Don’t touch any of the plants, though,’ Kit added with a grin. ‘I mean, we’ve already lost one Dahlia Lively on this movie. Two could be considered careless.’

An uncomfortable feeling seeped through her at the reminder of everything that had gone wrong with the film so far. Was her blackmailer looking for the final nail for the film’s coffin?

The path through the plants wound round in a steep curve, spiralling to the more open area in the centre, where an ornate metal bench stood waiting for them. Posy held her hands clasped in front of her, sticking to the centre of the path so no leaves or flowers could brush against her, and made her way to the bench. Probably a person needed to eat the flowers or leaves to be poisoned, but in a place like Aldermere, she wasn’t taking any chances.

She sat, flipping her skirt out around her legs, and Kit settled beside her. The bench was uncomfortably small for two people, but Posy supposed that was the point. She and Kit were supposed to be in love, after all.

Well, if they were going to be Dahlia and Johnnie, she’d have to get used to that. Especially if there was more than one movie, as everyone was hoping, and they kept going back to the 1930s for murder and romance.

She frowned. ‘If Lettice was still publishing Dahlia Lively mysteries into the seventies, why is everyone here dressed like they’re waiting for their sweetheart to come home from the war?’

‘I take it you haven’t read the books yet, then?’ His voice was kind, rather than condescending, which made her feel slightly better about her ignorance.

‘Not all of them.’ Or any, really, yet. But she would.

‘The books never moved on,’ Kit said, with an easy shrug. ‘They’re all set back then, between the wars. Some go into the nineteen forties, and one is set around VE Day, but that’s about it.’

Posy tipped her head backwards to look up at the bulky, square form of Aldermere House. Windows ran, evenly spaced, across the back of the building, above a large terrace outside. The roof was covered in chimneys, none of them belching smoke into the warm summer sky, although she imagined they would be in winter.

Under the eaves, there were smaller windows – an attic room. She blinked, as she realised. This was the bench that Clementine had been sitting on earlier that morning, when Posy had seen her talking to Hugh. Which meant those windows must be the ones to Lettice Davenport’s study, from where she’d viewed Clementine.

Beside her, Kit was uncharacteristically silent.