“Ah. Do we?” He rubbed his chin, which was in clear need of shaving. “I had a word with the lord lieutenant of the county and he decided we shouldn’t call in Scotland Yard on this matter. It was his feeling that we can’t prove we’re looking at a single murder here. We’ve no motive, no clues, no weapons.”

“What about Wild Sal? Presumably you arrested her because she was seen near the spot where the master of hounds vanished and her footprints were seen where the van went off the road.”

“Ah,” he said again. “I’ve had to release her. The lord lieutenant felt that we had no real evidence against her. Purely circumstantial, he said.”

“What about the wound to the horse’s leg? We know that was deliberate.”

“Not necessarily. Could have been trying to jump a wire sheep fence and hit the top strand.” He tried to give me a kindly look. “Look, we could speculate that some of the deaths were intentional—that telephone switchboard incident is definitely fishy, if you ask me. So maybe the telephone switchboard girl had overheard something she shouldn’t and needed to be silenced. Blackmailing someone, perhaps. I could go along with that. Maybe the old lady had been bullying her sisters or someone else in the house and they turned on the gas tap. That would make sense too. But there was no possible connection between them, was there? The lord lieutenant said he felt that we were just looking at a run of unlucky accidents, and that such things happen from time to time.”

“So you won’t investigate this as a potential crime?”

He rubbed his chin again. “When I thought that the convicts might be responsible, I did try to find forensic evidence of a crime at the scenes. Didn’t come up with anything, though. But there would be no reason for a convict to risk going into the middle of a busy town, where he might be spotted, to cross-wire a switchboard, and no reason for him to be anywhere near the farm where the woman was kicked by a cow.”

“So maybe that one could really have been an accident,” I conceded.

“We’ve no witnesses to any of the incidents, unless you count tonight. I’ve tried to take fingerprints but the room with the telephone switchboard was badly burned. There were no strange prints in the old lady’s bedroom. And the rest of the deaths happened outdoors. So until I find someone lying with a bloody great knife stuck in his back I’m afraid I’m going to have to drop the idea of a mass murderer at work. I never quite believed it, anyway. Didn’t make sense, did it?”