“Oh, how kind of you,” he said. “What an honor. I shall be thrilled, positively thrilled. Now you’ve given me a challenging task—what piece of music to play. What a delicious dilemma, isn’t it?”

We set the time of the concert for three o’clock the next day (“Not after dark, if you please; the church lighting is so poor and my hands won’t work when they get too cold”) and were glad to take our leave.

“Poor little man, I feel rather sorry for him, don’t you?” Mrs. Upthorpe said when we could finally take our leave. “Such a lonely life. Probably has nobody in the village to talk to.”

We arrived back to a second, and more satisfying, tea. The day seemed to drag on and on, with no news from the inspector. We played charades again before dinner, but this time it felt as if nobody’s heart was really in it and nobody had the urge to dress up, after the previous night’s horror. We had just gone up to change for dinner when there was a tap on my bedroom door. I opened it to find one of the maids.

“If you please, my lady, that police inspector has come to see you,” she said. “I’ve put him in the master’s study.”

I hurriedly finished dressing and went down the stairs. Inspector Newcombe had been pacing the room and spun around as I entered.

“I came because my constable impressed upon me that you had something terribly important to tell me. A matter of life and death, I believe was how he put it.”

I nodded. “But first what of Mr. Klein? Did anyone go and see what had happened to him?”

“We did,” he said, eyeing me coldly. “And it turned out he’s been staying with his daughter in Torquay. We felt like a lot of right charlies, I can tell you.”

“So he’s all right, then?”

“Perfectly.”

I let out a sigh of relief.

“Do you mind telling me what made you think he wasn’t all right?”

“Because he should have died on the twenty-fourth,” I said. “He was the gold rings.”

And I explained what I had figured out. He listened, at first with a smirk on his face, but then a frown formed on his forehead and his expression grew grimmer and grimmer as I went along.

“It’s positively bizarre,” he said at last, “but I have to admit it certainly fits. And if you’re right, then the man who died today did not have a heart attack.”

“Maybe he did,” I said. “If the killer knew he had a weak heart and was on medicine, he could easily have tampered with the dose. He has been staying here so you’ll probably find his medicines up in his bedroom. I suggest you take them with you for testing.”