Darcy glanced at my grandfather. “What do you think, sir? Georgie wants to do this, but I don’t want to be accused of stepping on the toes of the police.”

“Well, that inspector has asked for my advice, but I’m not so sure we should go questioning people behind his back,” Granddad said. “And anyway, I heard from the inspector that nobody in the house knew anything. They didn’t hear the shot. They didn’t know he’d gone out. I gather the servants sleep in another wing altogether and he normally didn’t get up before nine.”

“Well, that’s a lot of good,” I said. “I wish we knew who his friends were and whether he’d told any of them that he was planning this prank.”

“What would that prove?” Darcy asked. “He probably told quite a few people that he was planning the prank. If he wasn’t about to carry out some kind of stunt, what on earth was he doing up a tree with a shotgun and wire?”

I sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”

“Because if these are murders,” my grandfather said, “then someone has put a lot of thought and planning into making them look like accidents.”

“What kind of person would do this?” Darcy asked.

“Obviously a brainy type,” Granddad said. “A loner. Quiet sort, I’d say. And if he really has planned to kill these specific people, then I’d say he’s the kind who’d carry a grudge, maybe for years. A crime spree like this must have taken months of planning.”

“What if it’s a woman?” I asked. “Wild Sal fits those characteristics, doesn’t she?”

Granddad nodded. “It could be that the farmer’s wife, kicked to death in the dairy, was a genuine accident. We’ll just have to see if there are any more deaths. If there aren’t, then bob’s your uncle. Wild Sal it is.”

“We should be moving along if you want to cover all of the crime scenes,” Darcy said. “The second one—the man who fell off the bridge.”

“We can hardly ask the publican what time Ted Grover left, if he was dallying with the publican’s wife,” I said.

“But we could ask some of the other men,” Granddad said. “There’s a couple of them sitting outside the pub right now.”

We went over and I hung back, letting Darcy and my grandfather do the talking. They joined me soon after. “They say that nobody saw him leave. He definitely wasn’t in the bar at closing time, so he must have left well before that. Could have been round the back with the publican’s missus.” My grandfather paused. “And they were surprised he fell off the bridge because he didn’t seem to be drunk.”