It was the Baron Van der Veghel hoping Mr Grant was free.

‘Ask him to join us, please.’

Sophy stood up.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Grant said. ‘Sit down.’

‘Yes, but—well, anyway, you shut up.’

‘Siddown.’

‘I’ll be damned if I do,’ said Sophy, and did.

The Baron arrived: large, concerned and doubtful. He begged their forgiveness for so early a call and supposed that, like him, they had received a great shock. This led to some momentary confusion until, gazing at them with those wide-open eyes of his, he said, ‘But surely you must know?’ and finding they did not, flatly told them.

‘The man Mailer,’ he said, ‘has been murdered. He has been found at the bottom of the well.’

At that moment all the clocks in Rome began to strike nine and Sophy was appalled to hear a voice in her head saying: ‘Ding, dong bell. Mailer’s in the well.’

‘No doubt,’ the Baron said, ‘you will receive a message. As we did. This of course, changes everything. My wife is so much upset. We have found where is a Protestant church and I have taken her there for some comfort. My wife is a most sensitive subject. She senses,’ the Baron explained, ‘that there has been a great evil amongst us. That there is still this evil. As I do. How can one escape such a feeling?’

‘Not very readily,’ Grant conceded, ‘particularly now when I suppose we are all much more heavily involved.’

The Baron glanced anxiously at Sophy. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘we should—’

‘Well, of course we’re involved, Baron,’ she said.

Clearly, the Baron held that ladies were to be protected. He goes through life, she thought, tenderly building protective walls round that huge, comical sex-pot of his and he’s got plenty of concern left over for extramural sympathy. Who says the age of chivalry is dead? He’s rather a dear, is the Baron. But beneath her amusement, flowing under it and chilling it, ran a trickle of consciousness: I’m involved in a murder, thought Sophy.

She had lost track of the Baron’s further remarks but gathered that he had felt the need for discussion with another man. Having left the Baroness to pursue whatever Spartan devotions accorded with her need, he had settled upon Grant as a confidant.

Deeply perturbed though she was, Sophy couldn’t help feeling an indulgent amusement at the behaviour of the two men. It was so exclusively masculine. They had moved away to the far side of the garden. Grant, with his hands in his pockets, stared between his feet and then lifted his head and contemplated the horizon. The Baron folded his arms, frowned portentously, and raised his eyebrows almost to the roots of his hair. They both pursed their lips, muttered, nodded. There were long pauses.