The cup clattered back into its saucer, and she looked up to find Rosalind and Caro both watching her, staring at her, their expressions a mirror of her own. In the entrance hall, beside the family tree, and Lettice’s dollhouse, the old grandfather clock chimed midnight.

This endless day was over. And Posy wasn’t the same person who’d got on that train from London that morning.

She was Dahlia now. She’d seen a murder committed.

And she was going to solve it.

Sunday 29th August
Caro

Chapter Thirteen

‘Everyone has their talents, Johnnie. Mine just happen to be considerably more useful than most other people’s.’

Dahlia Lively in Death By Moonlight

By Lettice Davenport, 1937

Caro looked at Marcus’s body, slumped in his dining chair, vomit dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, and thought Thank God.

A surge of guilt followed hot on the heels of the thought, but she pushed it away. She’d been certain this whole weekend was another one of his games, a test or a tease. A way to control her, scare her. Certainly no one else could have been behind the photos Clementine had slipped under her door.

But apparently someone else had been playing with them after all.

Across the table Posy was sniffing Marcus’s coffee cup, getting her fingerprints needlessly all over a possible murder weapon. Caro had no idea what she thought she was going to smell. All the best poisons were odourless, and ideally tasteless. The idea of a poison that was undetectable by science had gone out with the golden age of crime, sadly, but undetectable by the victim was still very much an achievable aim. Marcus probably never realised what was happening to him until it was too late.

‘It must have been his heart,’ Isobel said, stubbornly, ignoring Felicity’s pronouncement. He’d had issues with it for years, and everyone had seen him take his medication. It was a reasonable assumption.

It wasn’t one that Caro shared. And she was pretty sure no one else in the room did, either. It was too much of a coincidence, wasn’t it? Him dying at the same moment as in the book?

What was the poison the killer used in The Lady Detective? Caro couldn’t quite remember.

Funny how all those murders merged into one in the memory, three years or more after the last camera rolled, but the individual moments – the people she’d worked with, the fun they’d had on set – stayed with her, sharp as daylight. The Dahlia Lively mysteries had never been only about solving a crime. They were like this weekend – a chance to escape to another world, one that had been slipping away even when Lettice started writing.

Murders in Lettice’s books were safe, almost. A puzzle, more than a loss.

Which brought her back to Marcus.