A crowd had gathered around him within moments, with Isobel yelling instructions to all and sundry while standing far enough back not to get her hands dirty. Heather, an ex-nurse apparently, was holding his wrist, while her husband dragged the vintage landline dial phone in from the library to call the ambulance. Ashok, meanwhile, slipped Marcus’s mobile phone from his pocket, and found the emergency call setting well before Harry could turn the dial to the nine three times.

‘Not that I think it’ll do him much good now, poor lamb.’ Heather ran her palm over Marcus’s face to close his eyes.

‘He always said he was one giant cheeseburger away from a heart attack,’ Harry added, mournfully, as he set aside the phone.

‘Better ask for the police, too,’ Hugh said to Ashok, who nodded. Beside him, Rosalind stood wringing her hands as she watched him, apparently more concerned with Hugh’s wellbeing than the man who had died. Did Hugh even realise that the woman he’d jilted all those years ago still loved him? Caro didn’t know. But it did seem a damn waste. Idiot man.

‘For a heart attack?’ Kit asked.

‘Unexplained sudden death,’ Rosalind replied. ‘The 999 operator will send them anyway.’

‘We shouldn’t touch anything, then,’ Ashok said, putting Marcus’s phone down beside the empty coffee cup after hanging up. ‘Just in case.’

The tension in the air was a palpable thing, as they backed away from the table. A step or two, but enough. Enough to show that they knew there was something wrong here. Felicity might have been the only one to say the word poison, but Caro knew they were all thinking it.

Maybe tomorrow they’d have convinced themselves it was a heart attack after all. But tonight … tonight, they were wondering. And they were scared.

What had Marcus been thinking, recreating a murderous dinner party, at Aldermere of all places?

Caro allowed herself to study each of the guests in turn – noticing that they were doing the same. All eyeing their dinner companions, wondering who might have slipped something in Marcus’s coffee. Who hated him enough to kill him? Who would take the risk, in a room full of people there to solve mysteries?

Caro had wanted the man dead as much as the next person, but she still wouldn’t have done it.

In the books, it always came down to means, motive and opportunity. But in real life, it took something more. It wasn’t enough to have a reason or a way or a chance to kill.

You had to be willing to do it. To take another life.

She didn’t have that in her. But someone in this room did.

Caro took another circuit of the room with her gaze.

The Davenport family. Hugh and Isobel, standing solemn and scared. Thank goodness Juliette had gone to bed, and was spared seeing this.