‘I say we ignore it all, for now,’ Caro said. ‘Let’s go and eat dinner. Things always make more sense after a good meal.’

Posy hoped she was right. Because right now, nothing made any sense at all.

The rest of the guests had already been shown through to the dining room, and were checking the seating chart that had been placed on a board by the far wall, when Posy and the others arrived.

‘Tonight, we will be enjoying a recreation of the tasting menu served in the first Dahlia Lively mystery, The Lady Detective,’ Marcus announced, from the head of the long mahogany dining table. ‘And in honour of the book, we shall also do as the characters did, and swap seats between every course. There’ll be a new chart put up with every plate.’ Which explained why it had taken Isobel so long to redo the seating plans.

There was an excited buzz in the room at the news; this was what people had come to Aldermere for this weekend, Posy realised. The chance to be a part of something they’d loved from a distance for so long. To step inside the pages of a Lettice Davenport novel.

‘Hopefully without the same deadly consequences, though,’ Marcus added, with a wink.

A ripple of laughter ran around the room. Posy hadn’t read the book, or done more than glance through the script she’d found, but she assumed the fictional dinner ended with a murder.

‘Not sure I can recommend the after-dinner coffees, in that case,’ Hugh joked to Posy as they took their places for the first course. ‘Probably better to stick to brandy!’

Posy smiled weakly, and poured herself a water.

As the starters arrived Felicity, her blue hair constrained by a feathered band, kept up a steady conversation with Hugh from his other side about his aunt’s legacy.

‘She was the most magnificent auntie,’ he said, fondly, over the single scallop they were served. Posy supposed that when you had eleven courses to get through, they all had to be fairly small. ‘She’d set up games and treasure hunts all over the gardens when I was a boy. She spent a lot of her school holidays here, you see, when her parents were overseas, so she knew all the best hiding places.’

‘But she never married, did she?’ Felicity speared her scallop whole and popped it in her mouth. ‘Do you think she never met anyone who lived up to Johnnie Swain in her imagination?’ She flashed a smile at Kit, sitting across the table.

On Posy’s other side, Juliette – now dressed in a sedate floral dress – prodded her scallop and muttered, ‘How many courses of this do we have to sit through again?’

‘Eleven,’ Posy murmured, and even she could hear the despair in her own voice.