‘My contention is that Van der Veghel, when he looked down, saw that Mailer’s body had gone and that Violetta’s lay where Mailer had left it. He returned and he stowed it in the sarcophagus, deliberately leaving a bit of her shawl exposed.

‘He wanted Violetta to be found.

‘He wanted the police to know Mailer had killed her. He wanted them to believe Mailer had bolted with her death on his head.

‘The whole business would, as one says, take less time to happen than it has taken to set it down. Eight minutes at the most, I’d say, and the Baroness was a great deal longer than that, setting up her group, fiddling and faddling, changing her “bulps”, taking a second shot. He was back, on his nimble rubber-studded shoes, well in time to take his own shots of the group. When he removed the film from the Baroness’s camera, he was careful to expose the greater part of it. He didn’t know about young Dorne’s shot.

‘And the Baroness? I could have driven him harder here. I could have forced him to confirm what I believe to be her part in the performance. I think she knew they were being blackmailed by Mailer and I think her husband asked her to hold up the proceedings while he kept his assignation and paid over the cash. I don’t believe she knows he killed Mailer and I don’t believe it would make a scrap of difference to their passionate, their overwhelming union if she did.

‘And finally—the material for blackmail? Troy, my darling, the chances of distantly related persons bearing a startling physical resemblance to each other are not impossible. But they are extremely remote. In our job we are taught that the ear gives one of the most valuable proofs of identification. The Van der Veghels’ ears are, if not identical as near as damn it, and very, very strange, great ears they are.

‘Fox, with his genius for inspiring gossip, has gleaned from a London representative of Adriaan and Welker that the late Baron was what he describes as a bit of a lad with a European reputation as such. The Baroness is said to belong to an expatriate branch of the family. She doesn’t accompany her husband on his visits to The Hague and is understood to be an invalid. She! The Baroness! An invalid!

‘I’ve gone on about their strangeness, haven’t I? Their resemblance, not only to each other but to the Etruscan antiquities to which they are so much attracted? I see them as larger than life: classical figures springing about behind, of all things, a nonconformist façade. And I think that very probably they are half-siblings.