After the Armistice Ball

Chapter Eleven

I saw it immediately this time, of course. Added to the fact of Mrs Duffy’s redecoration, it was so obvious that I felt some shame for not seeing it before. Because really, how could these dowdy stripes and sprigged muslins have been freely chosen by the same woman who had turned her drawing room at Drummond Place into an ice-cube?

I resolved to subject the idea to my harshest criticism while dressing, and see if it was still standing up by the time I was done. I was late already, but since Grant was in far too foul a temper to be let loose on my hair, I saved myself a good twenty minutes by pulling on a silk turban instead. Thank heavens for turbans in the evening. I hoped they would stay in fashion for ever, or at least until I was old enough to go on wearing them whether they were in or out. I pulled a couple of curls out at the front and tried to make them rest against my forehead, but this was wasting time. I still could not see any flaw in my discovery and could wait no longer to tell it to Alec, nor to quiz him on how he had wrested the album away from Clemence.

When I joined him and Hugh, moreover, I could see from his dancing eyes that he was bursting to tell me. Hugh, though, was well away on the relative merits of dry-stone walls and hedges and I had to wait until we were sitting down to dinner before I got in.

‘Tell me, Alec,’ I said, ‘to what do we owe this pleasure?’ For I could not imagine on what pretext he had insinuated himself into my household at less than a day’s notice. Hugh is not antisocial but he needs to be led up quite gently to the idea of a single visitor; they require so much more attention than does a crowd of twenty.

‘Came to see a horse,’ he said.

‘Uncommonly decent of you to take the time too,’ said Hugh. I, with a wife’s keenly attuned sensitivity, understood this to mean that Hugh had mentioned something in passing at Croys and meant nothing by it, so was now more than a little surprised to have it followed through. However, from his tone I also divined that he found Alec Osborne agreeable company and did not therefore mind too much.

‘I find myself with time to fill,’ said Alec. ‘I was expecting this week to be the run-up to a wedding, you know.’ Hugh gulped and turned to me beseechingly.

‘Have you seen any of the family since we left Gatehouse?’ I asked, knowing he had and wanting to know more.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Alec. ‘Lena is still away of course, but I spent the day with Clemence yesterday. She’s bearing up terribly well, and I took three good friends of Cara to visit which I’m sure helped. She seemed very much soothed by them.’

That explained it, I thought. Clemence could not withstand the combined efforts of Koo, Booty and Sha-sha (who could?), hence the presence on my bedside table of the leather volume. I could bet, though, that Clemence would be anything but soothed to reflect on having let it out of her clutches, and if she knew it was here with me she would be having absolute kittens.

‘Dreadful, dreadful thing,’ said Hugh, and we fell silent. Just as well, perhaps, since we were having mutton and if one does not shut up and eat it while it is hot, especially in a chilly place like our dining room, it can congeal quite horribly before one is halfway done.

I fetched the album down to the drawing room when I left the dinner table, and was sitting staring at the picture of Cara on the landing when the door opened. Hugh and I rarely sat together after dinner and I had expected Alec and him to return to the library. Indeed I was beginning to despair of getting a chance to talk to Alec at all, knowing that he should be out at the stables the next day, but here was a piece of good luck: Alec entered the drawing room alone.

‘Hugh asks you to excuse him, but he has work that must be done tonight. Something about a contractor? And asks me to excuse him, and asks me to ask you to excuse him to me, and generally wants us to spend the evening apologizing to each other on his behalf. Are there contractors?’

‘There are certainly drains,’ I said. ‘I rather thought it was clearing, which would suggest plumbers, but it may have been building, so contractors might be indicated.’

‘Or perhaps he just can’t face it,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve noticed people simply not knowing what to say to me.’

I poured him some coffee and decided to indulge in a little straight talking.

‘People don’t know, Alec dear. That is, they don’t know – and I didn’t myself if it comes to that – how you are taking the whole thing. You don’t seem perturbed. And it’s not -’ I said, holding up my hand to stop him interrupting, ‘it’s not because you know she’s not dead, before you say that. Because it was exactly the same when you thought she was. Bluntly, no one wants to extend the hand of sympathy for a sorrow you don’t appear to be suffering.’

Alec came and sat on the other end of the sofa; I think so that he might speak without having to look at me.

‘It wasn’t a great romance, if you must know.’ He spoke with a quiet, hard deliberation as though pushing the words out of himself as one forces notes from a brass horn. ‘But I liked her. Well, you know Cara, Dandy – she’s impossible not to like. And she seemed to like me, although I admit she seems to like everyone, so I can’t feel too flattered.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s that rare thing: an absolute darling who doesn’t make one sick. Less so recently, perhaps. More troubled. But generally, one would rather wonder why she wasn’t engaged long ago than marvel at her being so now.’

‘Quite,’ said Alec. ‘So I daresay I should think myself lucky she didn’t want a great romance any more than I did. We should have been happy, though, I’m sure. For one thing we had known each other all our lives, or known of each other at least, and that’s a start.’

‘Yes, you’re a distant relation, aren’t you?’ I said, only now remembering that someone had told me this. ‘And so were you always meant for Cara? From the cradle? Very touching.’

‘What a Victorian you are,’ said Alec, laughing. ‘From the cradle, indeed! Cara was just a cousin in Canada as far as I was concerned.’

But there was a shifty defiance about the way he spoke despite the laughter, and I knew he was rattled, embarrassed by more than just my teasing, and I remembered something he had mentioned lightly just in passing.

‘The mystery you hinted at, to do with Cara’s settlement? Have you any idea what it was?’

I was lucky again; Alec laughed so hard and so long this time that I could not help but join in.

‘You should have seven daughters, Dandy, instead of your sons. Talk about Lady Bracknell! But to answer the question… I always imagined that Gregory was to settle everything he could on Clemence and felt he couldn’t tell me this outright.’

‘Why on earth would you think that?’ I said. ‘Cara is by far his favourite, so much so that I feel sorry for Clemence sometimes.’

Alec turned to face me, to enjoy the look he was about to put on my face.

‘I rather thought he would settle what he could on Clemence because Dunelgar, Culreoch and the London house are coming to me. I’m Gregory’s heir.’

I choked on my coffee.

‘How too Mr Collins for words,’ I said at last, and luckily Alec gave another bark of laughter instead of slamming out of the room as I should have deserved.

‘What an idea! What things you do say, Dandy! No, I didn’t quite resolve to “make my choice from among his daughters” – although you’ve no idea what the girls in Dorset would have thought of moving to the Highlands; they shrank away at parties when they found out. Broke into a run, some of them. Anyway, as it turned out, my elder brother… And so I might have stayed in Dorset after all.’ He laughed again, but this time absolutely mirthlessly, and went on in a loud, blustering voice with a small tremble at the back of it that made me want to take him on to my lap like one of my sons. ‘Since I was getting Gregory’s pile, I convinced my father to settle on my younger brother after Edward was killed. Now what do you bet Gregory changes his mind and I end my days in a home for old soldiers?’

‘But could he change his mind?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it an entail?’

‘Liferent,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t think you get entails up here, do you?’ I shrugged. ‘Meaning he can’t sell them but must pass them on along the male line. So, more or less an entail really, except that it needn’t be me.’

‘But you’re an Osborne,’ I said. ‘Not a Duffy. How can you be male line? I’ve never understood how Mr Collins can be Mr Bennet’s male heir, come to that.’

‘My grandfather, Gregory’s father’s brother, married a Miss Osborne,’ said Alec. ‘She was an only child and so, much to the delight of her family although to the disgust of his own…’

‘He changed his name?’ I was laughing again.

‘It’s not so unusual really,’ said Alec. ‘Much commoner than you’d think.’ He was looking away from me again and seemed defiant.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Darling, tell me you weren’t going to!’

Alec had the grace to look sheepish.

‘As I say, when there’s land or loot hanging on it, it’s not as unusual as you’d think. And in my case I’d be changing back anyway, to what I should have been if my grandfather hadn’t been swayed by the Osbornes.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. I thought about all of this for a moment, wondering if it had any bearing on the case. ‘It’s all very dynastic,’ I concluded.

‘To tell the truth,’ said Alec, ‘I hardly thought about it until after the war. When I went off to the front, Lena and Gregory might easily have had a son of their own and I might easily have not come back.’

‘Yes,’ I said, sobered. ‘In 1914, Lena can barely have been forty and the girls were still children. I suppose because they had the two of them so quickly and so close together and then no more, one doesn’t think of it. But look at Queen Victoria.’

‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘So it was only when I came to visit a year or two ago that I really began to believe in it.’

‘And you met Cara again, and your eyes locked over the estate accounts and -’

‘Oh, shut up!’

‘What if Cara never comes back?’ I said. ‘And the only way to keep the estate together – your bit and Clemence’s bit – is for you to -’

‘Will you shut up!’ said Alec louder, but still laughing. ‘I am not quite such a Mr Collins as to run through the family, even if there is no Mary waiting at the bottom of the barrel.’

‘What about the diamonds?’ I said. ‘Are they part of the “boys only” bit? I must say it’s very unfair if they are.’

‘Don’t know,’ said Alec, shortly.

He didn’t know? This was strange. Diamonds as precious as the rest of the estate put together and he didn’t know whether they were to be his? Or his wife’s, if she ever came back. It spoke volumes to his credit to be so unconcerned about their fate, I thought. But did he know they weren’t insured? Had I told him that? Or was he perhaps this careless only because he assumed that a huge insurance cheque would be his instead?

Finding the diamonds seemed to be the best idea all round, and the best way to go about it seemed just as clear: find Cara. I turned with relief to something I knew, spreading the album open on the sofa between us. Alec looked as pleased as I was at the change of topic.

‘Two pieces of earth-shattering news, darling,’ I said. ‘These pictures, this one and this one,’ I flipped back and forth between the two images of Cara’s smiling face, ‘were not taken at the cottage at all.’

Alec looked at each them for a long time, then at the others, and began nodding slowly. I was disappointed; I had hoped for a chance to explain. Gratifyingly though, when he spoke at last, he said: ‘I think you’re right. There’s something funny about them, but I can’t put my finger on it.’

‘Look,’ I said, eagerly, bending over the album with my head beside his. ‘Here she’s resting her arm on a mantelpiece, and it’s directly opposite a window, which means it’s in the middle of a flat wall. Now the fireplaces in the cottage were all set across the corners of the room. Look at the picture of the garden, see? Just one chimney with eight pots right in the middle of the roof. Sitting room, dining room, morning room, kitchen range and four bedrooms; I could practically draw you a floor plan. And just to make sure, if you look closely at this one of Lena in what is supposed to be the same sitting room, same wallpaper, same curtains, you can just see that this corner of the wall doesn’t turn at a right-angle and look! What’s that?’ Alec bent even closer over the picture and scrutinized the object in the corner.

‘Dark wood and brass hoops,’ he said. ‘It’s a coal bucket.’

‘A coal bucket, yes. By the fire in the corner. That dark block that stops halfway up the wall is the fireplace. And there’s no way it could be the same fireplace as in the picture of Cara, is there?’ Alec shook his head.

‘Now the one on the staircase. This one isn’t at the beach cottage either. You see how the window behind her is set into the wall like an ordinary window? Well, the upstairs windows at the cottage were all dormers, you know, set into the roof. And once again if we look at the picture in the garden you can see the side of the upstairs windows sticking out. If there was a landing window flat on a wall on the front of the house we should be able to see the taller part sticking up from this angle and we can’t. These two pictures were not taken at the cottage.’ I waited for the praise that was to come. Alec flipped back and forward a couple more times and then nodded firmly, with his lips pushed out in a pout of either satisfaction or grudging admiration, I was not sure which. I should tell him, I knew, about the other cottage and not let him think I had got all this from looking with a better eye at what he himself had also seen. Perhaps I would some day, but for the moment I was content to be thought of as a detective genius.

‘Now,’ I went on. ‘The question is why? Why did Lena go to all the trouble of redecorating the cottage to make it look as though these pictures were taken there? Why not simply take pictures of Cara at the cottage?’

‘Are you really asking?’ said Alec. ‘Or do you already know?’ He said it in a good-natured enough way, but I thought I should be careful not to be so triumphant as to be sickening.

‘There are two possible reasons,’ I said. ‘Either because Cara was never there, or because the pictures had to be taken after she left, or without her knowledge.’

‘That’s three,’ said Alec, but I ignored him. ‘And we know that she was there because of the other pictures.’ He flipped through the album until he came to the snap of Mrs Duffy in the garden with Cara disappearing into the house behind her.

‘That,’ I said and paused dramatically with my finger on the crêpe-de-Chine back, ‘is not Cara. It’s Clemence in Cara’s dress.’

‘Did you find the person who took the picture?’ said Alec.

‘You are looking at her,’ I said. ‘She’s there.’ Alec stared first at me and then at Clemence/Cara’s back in the photograph, and I took my finger and put it down on the paper, just where Lena’s hand disappeared behind a fold of her dress, then I traced the path of the cable down the back of the chair leg and under the picnic rug into the foreground, stopping where just the tiniest little piece of it was visible at the edge of the frame.

‘Very clever,’ said Alec. ‘It did seem odd that Cara should flounce off the way Clemence described. Not typical Cara at all.’

‘And if she were flouncing,’ I said, ‘she’d be blurred.’ We both looked in silence at the sharp outline of the figure in the dark doorway.

‘But what about all the others?’ said Alec. I waited in smug silence for him to discover what I had discovered as soon as this idea began to take hold.

‘There’s only one more,’ he said, presently. ‘On the cliff.’

‘And that could be anyone,’ I said, peering at the figure in the billowing dress standing beside Lena in the distance, with her hands jammed into her pockets while Lena waved. ‘Although in fact I think it’s no one. I think it’s a dressmaker’s dummy and that’s why it was taken from so far away and why they had to pose in long grass. You know, I had thought that it was a silly mistake to take all of the pictures with “Cara” in the same dress, but actually it was only the dress that made us believe it was Cara in the first place, and it almost worked.’

‘So she wasn’t there?’ said Alec, closing the album. ‘She was never there at all. She just wrote the letters at home before they left and Mrs Duffy or Clemence posted them from the cottage, timing them perfectly so that I should arrive just too late.’

‘Now for my second staggering piece of news,’ I said. ‘She was there. At least for one night. Mrs Marshall saw her on Tuesday.’ I described to him the old woman’s glimpse of the ‘third’ girl and the elaborate attempts to establish the existence of two identical sisters during the rest of the week. Alec shook his head as I spoke and looked increasingly troubled.

‘I should have got to the truth much quicker,’ I said. ‘Only when Mrs Marshall mentioned this girl on a bicycle pedalling hell for leather I naturally thought it was the poor little maid.’

Alec’s mouth had dropped open and far too late I realized what I had said.

‘A poor little maid? Why is this the first I’ve heard about a poor little maid? And why poor?’ I shrugged, hoping to avoid the unpleasantness of explaining. Alec spread his hands wide and practically shouted at me.

‘You must find her, Dandy, and see what she has to say. You must talk to her as soon as you can. I don’t know what’s got into you!’

‘I… Well, I can’t talk to her, if you must know,’ I said, and took a deep breath. ‘She died.’

‘When? How? What are you talking about?’

‘Suicide, I suppose you would call it,’ I said. ‘Dr Milne told me. Rather against his will since he had hushed it up for them and was embarrassed. And I didn’t tell you because Dr Milne asked me to keep it to myself.’ Alec was still looking at me as though I were a halfwit, and I suppose with good reason. I was still bowdlerizing. No wonder men end up unable to deal with the grislier aspects of life, when they go through their lives being invited by nannies, wives and daughters to look the other way while hurried drapes are thrown over anything ugly.

‘Suicide,’ said Alec and whistled. ‘That must have given them pause. I wonder they had the nerve to go ahead with the fire. And I wonder why she did it.’ I looked back at him blankly.

‘But about your Mrs Marshall seeing Cara,’ he said presently and I was glad that the little maid was dropped. ‘Why would they let her bicycle away in the daylight after all the other precautions? The redecoration, the photographs, the letters. These things are all so very careful and elaborate, and Cara rolling along the country lanes would ruin it.’

‘Well then, perhaps she wasn’t “leaving”. Perhaps she had just slipped out on some errand or other.’

Alec thumped his hand down on the black leather of the album, making me start and rattle my cup which was, thankfully, empty by now.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We know she slipped out on an errand. She went to post a letter, didn’t she?’

Once again the letters were taken from his inside pocket and spread out side by side.

‘“If you could pretend to Mummy”,’ he read, ‘“that you came in search of me off your own bat… I think she’s being perfectly ridiculous, but I don’t want to make her any crosser.” She sneaked out to post this to me, Dandy. I’m sure of it.’

‘As we thought. You were never meant to be there,’ I said. ‘I was supposed to turn up on my own and be taken in.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Alec. ‘I’m afraid so. I’m rather afraid Lena was grooming you for the role of the stooge from the time she got her claws into you at Croys. Yes, I’m sure of this now. The second letter was the only one I was ever supposed to see.’

‘Yes!’ I said, suddenly remembering. ‘Lena referred to “a silly letter” when I saw her in her bedroom on the day of the inquiry. And I remember now, when I mentioned about you showing the Fiscal the letters – plural – she flinched.’ I knew this was right, unflattering as it might be to have been cast as Lena’s puppet.

‘I still don’t see what the point was, though,’ I said. ‘All that furious bicycling to deliver such a casual letter. If she wanted to see you badly enough to send it she would have told you to hurry, not said you might like to come when you had a free minute. Why did she not ask you to come straight away?’

‘Oh, Dandy,’ said Alec, suddenly reaching out and taking hold of my hand. ‘Don’t you see? Can’t you?’ I didn’t and couldn’t, but I knew some part of our story would soon have to give way under the weight of all the things that no longer made any sense.

‘I don’t think she knew she had to tell me to hurry,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t think she knew. Back to your reasons for faking the pictures – she was there and if they were all done on the same day, they could easily have been done at the start of the week while she was still there. So it must be the third reason. They had to be done without her knowledge. She didn’t know what was going on.’

‘But the second letter?’ I said, but even while I was speaking I began to wonder. ‘She did write it, didn’t she?’ Alec shook his head.

‘No. Clemence wrote the second letter.’

‘But it’s so perfectly identical,’ I said.

‘As was Chrissie Dalrymple’s letter of condolence,’ said Alec. ‘They all were at school together. Why did we not think of it that day at the George when Chrissie’s letter came? And I should have known from that “C”. Cara always signed herself “Cara” even on a note, but I suppose…’

‘Clemence knew that her handwriting would convince but she wasn’t so sure about attempting a signature?’

‘Precisely,’ said Alec. ‘Now where does that leave us? What exactly are we saying?’

‘We seem to be saying,’ I said, ‘that Cara was not in on the plot. That’s good, in one way, isn’t it? From your point of view, I mean. Doesn’t it make you feel a little better to know that your wife-to-be was innocent – at least to begin with? I do hope she was filled in at some point, though. I mean, I hope Lena and Clemence and whoever came to take Cara away told her what it was all about and got her consent, because otherwise… Well, it sounds too silly for words, but otherwise it’s kidnap.’

‘I have the most dreadful feeling,’ said Alec, ‘that I’d be quite happy to settle for kidnap, Dandy, right at this moment.’

I got up to throw logs on to the fire and was astonished to find, glancing at the clock, that it was after eleven. Hugh, it seemed, would not be joining us at all. I sat down again, rather heavily, and scrubbed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, doing who knew what to my makeup, but the lights were low.

‘So, what if the plan was to kill her?’ said Alec. ‘Let’s just allow ourselves to think it for a while, think it through.’ For I was shaking my head already. ‘Just go along with it, Dandy, please. Kill her at the beginning of the week, dry out the cottage, fake the pictures, fake her presence and make sure the fire was so severe that no one could tell she was dead before it began. That would explain why she didn’t take part in the fakery.’

‘But why?’ I breathed, trying and failing to stop myself from believing such a repulsive idea. ‘Never mind how – and Alec, my dear, the how is a huge obstacle. I don’t mean how was it managed? I mean how could she? It’s unspeakable.’

‘Unspeakable things happen, Dandy. Every day they do. And as for why: to stop Cara from telling me she had stolen the diamonds. To stop me from telling the police. To save the family name -’

‘To cover up a theft!’ I said. ‘For pride? Alec, please listen to me. A mother, any mother, and God knows I’m far from being the Madonna in modern form, but any mother would rather have her two daughters at her side in the workhouse than that one should die so she could hold her head up.’

‘Your opinion does you credit,’ he said. ‘Do you have a better theory?’

‘How about this?’ I said. ‘Cara stole the jewels. Mrs Duffy and Clemence planned the fire to cover her disappearance and were to collect the insurance money for the diamonds. Cara, though, was not convinced until the very last minute that she had to disappear, hence her letter to you saying that she thought she might be able to talk you round.’

‘And did Cara have to get away because she stole the jewels or did she steal the jewels to fund an escape? In which case what did she have to get away from?’

‘Well, I suppose the obvious thing is you,’ I said. ‘Her engagement.’

There was a very long silence at this, and one for which I could hardly blame him.

‘Why not just break it off?’ he said at last.

‘Because you are her father’s heir. We keep forgetting about Cara’s father in all of this, because we’re so sure her mother and sister worked the whole thing themselves. Perhaps she dared not tell her father she wouldn’t marry you.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘Cara could wind Gregory around her finger and frequently did. And why wasn’t she in on the faked photographs? Can you explain that?’

No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I’m too tired. In fact, we’re both exhausted; we’re probably just seeing shadows.’ Alec shook his head.

‘This isn’t going to go away,’ he said. ‘But you’re right – we are tired. Let’s sleep on it.’

Leaving him to finish his pipe I retired. I had indeed rendered myself comical with eye-rubbing and I was glad Grant wasn’t there to pour silent scorn upon me. (Our arrangement was that on ordinary evenings if I stayed up after eleven I shifted for myself.) I left my frock inside out on a chair in a small act of defiance, and got into bed to lie on my back while my cold cream soaked in, glad to have a little thinking time without Alec there to sway me.

He was leading me off the track, I was sure, because he would not pay attention to the diamonds, discomfited perhaps about being Mr Duffy’s heir and fearing that any concern on his part towards the question of the diamonds might be mistaken as self-interest. I felt it increasingly, though, that he was letting his squeamishness overcome his judgement. They had to be important. I had to be able to come up with a solution to the mystery which took the diamonds into account. I resolved not to sleep until I had done so.

Cara, dressed in a frock of pale, striped wallpaper, was up to her elbows in a washtub, suds spilling over the top and down the sides washing the gold colour off the brass bandings. I stepped closer to see what she was washing. Under the water, clear now, the bubbles magically gone, she was rubbing handfuls of diamonds together as small children do with shells on the beach.

‘You see,’ she said, turning towards me and smiling, with the sun glinting through the stray golden hairs which had risen from the sleek cap of her bob in the steam, ‘gone. Quite gone.’ I looked back into the tub and saw that indeed the diamonds were melting in the water, disappearing. And as I watched Cara’s hands, too, were beginning to wear away, until they were down to fingerless stumps like the hands of a burned child I had seen once and never forgotten.

I sat up in bed, glad of the moonlight, glad not to be in the dark where that image might linger, but still I jumped and clutched the covers under my chin as my bedroom door opened a crack. There was a soft knock before it opened further.

‘Dandy?’ Alec whispered, coming right inside and waiting a bit for his eyes to adjust before he moved again. Still groggy and rattled as one is after waking from a dream, I was unable to speak and only blinked and gulped as Alec came to sit on the edge of my bed. He started with a reassurance.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said. ‘And don’t be alarmed: it’s not a social call.’

‘What’s up?’ I asked, recovering my sangfroid. ‘Can’t it wait till morning?’

‘No.’ He stopped and ran his hands over his face, and I could hear the rasp of the stubble which somehow made him sound even more tired than his weary voice.

‘Do you have a glass of water there?’ he asked. I passed it to him and waited for him to speak again.

‘I think I’ve had the whole thing wrong,’ he said.

I sank back on to my pillows with relief, but worse was to come than I had even imagined up to now.

‘This evening,’ he went on, ‘I was arguing that Lena and Clemence killed her, kept the body somewhere, faked their record of a happy holiday with the photographs, and then set the fire to explain her death. But… Well, they’re hardly seasoned arsonists, are they? If there had been a sudden downpour, or if the men managed to put it out and there was a body left to be examined, it would have been obvious that the fire was a cover-up job, and that would mean the noose, for one or both of them.

‘However, if they tried to burn an empty house and put it about that Cara was in there, all they would have to say – if the house didn’t burn, you understand – all they would have to say was that she couldn’t have been there after all. They could even say that she must have started the fire and run away.’ He reached out both his hands towards me and I put mine into them.

‘Tell me about this maid,’ he said. ‘This poor girl who was supposed to have committed suicide most conveniently for everyone and who seems to have departed her life leaving not a ripple.’

‘What about her?’ I asked, whispering again and fighting against the idea forming in my mind.

‘Two things,’ said Alec. ‘Had Dr Milne ever seen her before? And more to the point, did Dr Milne ever meet Cara?’