“But you’ve had nothing to go on,” my grandfather said, ushering the inspector to the armchair by the fire. “I mean, there’s not been one of these deaths that one could pinpoint as a murder. No signs of foul play, no motive at all, was there?”

The inspector nodded. “You’re right. No clues, no motive, no sense at all. To start with I thought it might be those escaped convicts, killing because someone had spotted their hideout. But that wouldn’t explain a switchboard operator in town, would it? And an escaped convict wouldn’t go to the trouble of setting up a trip wire for someone’s horse. He’d have been able to stay hidden very nicely in that kind of mist without doing anything. No—that horse’s leg has opened my eyes, so to speak. That was a deliberate act of malice. I don’t know if it was aimed at a particular person or just at the hunt in general, but it was certainly aimed at felling a rider.”

“Did you find the actual tree where the trap was laid?” I asked.

“My boys might have done so by now, but quite frankly they’ve been stretched to the limit, what with finding this Wild Sal and bringing her in. My, but she was a little tiger. Put curses on my men too, like someone possessed by the devil—scared the daylights out of some of them, I can tell you.”

“If you look at it logically,” Noel Coward interjected in his bored upper-class drawl, “you still couldn’t come to the conclusion that you were looking at a string of murders. The horse’s leg is the only sign of outside intervention—unless you found telltale boot marks around that tree in the orchard or signs of a scuffle where the man fell off the bridge.”

“To tell you the truth, sir, we bungled both of those,” the inspector said. “That first one with the man in the tree—well, we just took it to be a stupid accident, see. So we walked around a bit and left our footprints all over the place. Same goes for the man who fell off the bridge. Didn’t occur to us that they were crime scenes to begin with.”

“Why would it?” Granddad said. “You don’t expect someone to be lurking and pushing people off bridges in this part of the world.”

“You do not, sir,” the inspector agreed. “But after eight days of one death per day, I have to believe that someone is behind this.”

“Not one death per day,” I interrupted. “There was no death on December twenty-fourth, remember?”