He returned to the staircase. Generations had come down them, gone up them, and no one had worried about them. Until now. Hamish, stirring restlessly in the back of his mind, whispered, “I didna’ like this business. Leave the dead in their graves, man!”

Upstairs were the bedrooms. They were beautifully proportioned, with tall windows and handsome fireplaces. But old-fashioned now, as if no one had worried about the faded hangings and the worn carpets, preferring the familiar to the new.

He found the upstairs study where the suicides had occurred, thanks to the floor plan that Dawlish had sketched for him. It was a long room, windows looking out over the sea and over the gardens. A room of light and the warmth of the sun, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, but used, comfortable, ordinary. Nothing here to tell anyone where a famous poet worked, except perhaps for the typewriter sitting covered on a table by the seaward window. A guide would have to make do with the collection of books on either side of the table, set neatly on their shelves. “Here the poet found her inspiration among the works of ...”

But did she? Who could know?

Nearby was another table, where someone had been carving. The hull of a great ship lay, white and unfinished, among the scraps and curls of wood. It was a scale model of an ocean liner, Rutledge thought, looking at it. And there were others in a long case beneath the garden windows, intricately fashioned miniatures. He recognized several of them—the Olympia, the Sirius, the Lusitania. Whose work were these? Nicholas Cheney’s? Had they been a hobby for its own sake or did they represent a love of the sea that had been repressed to this room?

He crossed the room to the couch against the wall, where the bodies of brother and sister had lain side by side in death, their hands touching as if for comfort as the darkness closed in. Why had they died?

“I don’t like it here, man,” Hamish said. “If you’re going to investigate a murder, get about it.”

“Murder sometimes has its roots in other places than the few feet of space where it happened. Still, why here? Why on that night?”

“Hello?”

A voice calling from the hall below startled him badly.

He walked out to the gallery at the top of the stairs and looked down. There was a woman at the foot of the stairs, the front door open behind her, and she was looking up anxiously, as if almost afraid of what might walk out of one of the rooms there to confront her.

“Inspector Rutledge,” he said, moving towards the steps. “I arrived last night and came to have a look around. Constable Dawlish provided me with keys.”