‘I told you. It’s been stolen,’ Isobel snapped. ‘And nobody is leaving Aldermere until I am certain they haven’t taken it. I want every bag searched before anyone gets on a bus. And if we don’t find it, you can be sure I’ll be calling the police and giving them the details of that car.’

Isobel glared at her husband, then looked pointedly at Marcus.

‘Ah, right. I’ll get on that now.’ He lumbered down the steps towards the waiting buses to talk to the drivers.

‘It must have been taken during the house tours!’ Ashok said, excitedly. ‘No one else was allowed upstairs in the house unless they were on a tour.’ Apart from Clementine, of course, but that didn’t seem to trouble Ashok.

‘Which means it could have been one of us!’ Felicity added. Instantly, they were discussing theories, Kit in the middle of it all adding alien conspiracies to the mix.

‘That’s a very conveniently timed emergency, don’t you think?’ Caro murmured from beside Posy. ‘What do you reckon? Lost her bottle for blackmail and did a bunk with the magnifying glass instead?’

‘Or maybe she realised what she was caught up in and decided to run before she got in any deeper,’ Rosalind suggested.

‘Either way, I think a lot of people would like a word with her. Me included.’ Posy surveyed the crowds, humming with theories and questions, while Rosalind and Caro got drawn into the VIP debate about who could be responsible. It was probably time to get out of there before anyone remembered that she’d been on the tour too. She was already branded a murderer; she had no desire to add thief to her résumé for the weekend.

Posy headed into the hallway, pausing at the convention desk as she spotted Clementine’s clipboard sitting there, abandoned. The front page was a copy of the day’s schedule, liberally annotated in Clementine’s handwriting; Posy had seen her jotting notes on it herself.

She picked it up. Then she unfolded the note from her bag, and compared the two.

The same handwriting. Clementine had written the notes all three Dahlias had received.

One question answered. So many more to go.

An hour later, Posy still didn’t have any answers, but she was a little better educated on the life and times of Lettice Davenport, and why the China Room was so damn creepy.

Sixty minutes of solitude to skim through the books she’d accumulated gave her more confidence about the next item on her agenda, too. The film panel, in the main marquee out on the South Lawn. This time, she hoped she was ready for whatever the fans had to throw at her.