‘Where was Clementine playing dead?’ Rosalind asked.

Posy pointed to the stall at the far end. Once, Aldermere must have owned a whole herd of horses, if the number of stalls were representative. Now, much of the stables seemed to be used for storage.

‘Clementine?’ Posy waited until she was right outside to call, not wanting to give her a chance to escape. But when she entered, the stall was empty. All that remained was the scent of fresh straw, and an abandoned map of Aldermere, marked with footprints on the floor. ‘She’s gone.’

Rosalind glared at Caro. ‘If only we’d come straight here, we’d have caught her.’

Caro rolled her eyes. ‘She’s staying in the same house as us. I think we’ll have another chance to talk to her.’

‘Still, we could have tied this whole thing up by now if you’d told us what you knew right at the start,’ Rosalind said. ‘But no, you just had to play Dahlia, examining the whole damn folly for clues when you knew who’d sent them all along!’

Posy followed the bickering Rosalind and Caro out of the stable yard towards the West Lawn, playing over the strange events of the afternoon in her head.

‘We can still go find her now,’ Caro said.

‘If she wants to be found,’ Rosalind snapped back. ‘There are a million places to hide at Aldermere if she doesn’t.’

‘What would Dahlia do?’ Posy interrupted.

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Caro replied. ‘She’d find the script the pages came from.’

‘And examples of Clementine and Marcus’s handwriting for comparisons, probably,’ Rosalind added.

‘Then we should do that, shouldn’t we?’ Posy suggested. Rosalind and Caro looked at her like she was missing something obvious. ‘Oh. I could do that.’

Even if it turned out that Caro was right, and this was one of Marcus’s pranks, she didn’t want any reviews that said, Handed a mystery on a plate, fledgeling Dahlia Posy Starling ignored it completely.

‘I’ll get on with that, then,’ she said. ‘Finding the script, I mean. You two search for Clementine.’

‘Oh, I think you might have something else to do first,’ Rosalind said, archly, as Caro cupped a hand to her mouth and yelled, ‘She’s over here!’

Posy turned to see a mob of fan investigators approaching, Kit at the front wearing a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat he’d found somewhere, grinning wildly as he said, ‘There she is! Arrest her!’

Chapter Nine

‘You know, people think the most interesting investigations are always murder enquiries,’ Johnnie said, as he studied the files in the desk drawer. ‘But a really clever theft can be just as engaging, done right.’

Dahlia gave him a disbelieving look, before waving the piece of paper she’d found half burned in the fireplace at him. ‘You probably won’t be interested in this death threat over here then, will you?’