"My God!" he said with a groan, surreptitiously tucking her hat into his pocket, very conscious that it was a DNA gold mine. If she forgot it, the problem could be solved. "You're as bad as he is. Do you want to put that into English?"

"Take out the people you can identify, like the Weldon woman, then concentrate on Darth Vader. He'll be easier to neutralize once you've isolated him." She smiled at his expression. "It's bog-standard tactics."

"I'm sure it is," he said sourly. "Now tell me how to do it without injunctions."

"Divide and rule. You've made a start on Mrs. Weldon's husband. How did he react?"

"Angrily. He didn't know she'd been making calls."

"That's good. Who else has 1471 identified?"

"Eleanor Bartlett… lives in Shenstead House, about fifty yards down the road. She and Prue Weldon are close friends."

"Then that'll be the strongest axis against James. You need to split them."

He bared his teeth in a sarcastic grimace. "And how do I do that?"

"Start believing in the cause you're fighting for," she said dispassionately. "It's no use being halfhearted about it. If Mrs. Weldon's version of events is true, then James is lying. If James is telling the truth then it's Mrs. Weldon who's lying. There are no gray areas. Even if Mrs. Weldon believes she's telling the truth-but it isn't the truth-then it's a lie." She bared her teeth back at him. "Pick a side."

To Mark, for whom the entire issue was a confusing collage of grays, this was an extraordinarily simplistic argument and he wondered what she'd read at Oxford. Something with defined parameters; engineering, he guessed, where torque and thrust had defined limits and mathematical equations produced conclusive results. In fairness, she hadn't heard the tapes, but even so… "Reality is never so black and white," he protested. "What if both sides are lying? What if they're being honest about one thing and lying about another? What if the event they're disputing has no bearing on the alleged crime?" He jabbed a finger at her. "What do you do then… assuming you have a conscience and you don't want to shoot the wrong person?"

"Resign your commission," Nancy said bluntly. "Become a pacifist. Desert. All you do by listening to enemy propaganda is compromise your morale and the morale of your troops. It's bog-standard tactics." She jabbed a finger back at him to stress the words. "Propaganda is a powerful weapon. Every tyrant in history has demonstrated that."

Eleanor Bartlett was satisfyingly bullish when Prue phoned to relay the news about travelers in the Copse. She was an envious woman who enjoyed a grievance. Had she been wealthy enough to indulge her whims, she would have taken her grievances to court and been dubbed a "malicious litigant." As she wasn't, she contented herself with destabilizing relationships under the guise of "straight-speaking." It made her generally disliked, but also gave her influence. Few wanted her as an enemy, particularly the weekenders whose absences meant they couldn't guard their reputations.

It was Eleanor who had urged her husband to accept early retirement in order to move to the country. Julian had agreed reluctantly, but only because he knew that his days with the company were numbered. Nevertheless, he had serious doubts about the wisdom of leaving the city. He was content with where he was in life-senior-management level, a decent portfolio on the stock market which would pay for a cruise or two during retirement, like-minded friends who enjoyed a drink after work and a game of golf on weekends, easygoing neighbors, cable television, his children by his previous marriage within a five-mile radius.

As usual, he was overruled by a mixture of silence and tantrums, and the sale four years ago of their modest (by London standards) home on the outer fringes of Chelsea had allowed them to trade up to a more impressive address in a Dorset village where inflationary city prices overwhelmed provincial ones. Shenstead House, a fine Victorian building, lent tradition and history to its owners where 12 Croydon Road, a 1970s construction, had not, and Eleanor invariably lied about where she and Julian had lived before-"down the road from Margaret Thatcher"; what his position had been within the company-"director"; and how much he had been earning-"a six-figure salary."

Ironically, the move had proved more successful for him than it had for her. While the isolation of Shenstead, and its tiny resident population, had given Eleanor the status of a large fish in a small pond-something she had always craved-those same factors had made the victory a hollow one. Her attempts to ingratiate herself with the Lockyer-Foxes had come to nothing-James had avoided her, Ailsa had been polite but distant-and she refused to lower herself by befriending the Woodgates or, worse, the Lockyer-Foxes' gardener and his wife. The Weldons' predecessors at Shenstead Farm had been depressing company because of their money problems, and the weekenders-all wealthy enough to own a house in London and a cottage by the sea-were no more impressed by the new mistress of Shenstead House than the Lockyer-Foxes had been.

Had Julian shared her ambitions to break into Dorset society, or made more of an effort to support them, it might have been different, but, freed from the shackles of earning a living and bored with Eleanor's criticism of his laziness, he had cast around for something to do. A naturally gregarious man, he homed in on a friendly pub in a neighboring village and drank his way slowly into the agricultural community, unconcerned whether his boon companions were landowners, farmers, or farm laborers. Born and bred in Wiltshire, he had a better idea than his London-born wife of the pace at which things happened in the countryside. Nor, to his wife's disgust, did he have a problem sharing a pint with Stephen Woodgate or the Lockyer-Foxes' gardener, Bob Dawson.

He did not invite Eleanor to join him. Spending time with her and her sharp tongue had made him realize why he had viewed retirement with such reluctance. They had been able to tolerate each other for twenty years because he had been out of the house all day, and it was a pattern he stuck to now. Over a period of months he resurrected his boyhood love of riding, took lessons, reappointed the stable at the back of his house, fenced off half the garden as a paddock, purchased a horse, and joined the local hunt. Through these connections he found satisfactory golfing and snooker partners, enjoyed a sail now and then, and after eighteen months pronounced himself entirely satisfied with life in the country.

Predictably, Eleanor was furious, accusing him of wasting their money on selfish pursuits that benefited only him. She harbored a continuing resentment that they had missed the housing boom by a year, particularly when she learned that their ex-neighbors in Chelsea had sold an identical house two years later for a hundred thousand more. With typical doublethink, she conveniently forgot her part in the move, and blamed her husband for selling out too soon.

Her tongue grew teeth. His redundancy hadn't been that generous, in all conscience, and they couldn't afford to splash out whenever they felt like it. How could he waste money on doing up the stable when the house needed redecorating and recarpeting? What sort of impression would faded paint and shabby carpets make on visitors? He'd joined the hunt deliberately to scupper her chances with the Lockyer-Foxes. Didn't he know that Ailsa supported the League Against Cruel Sports?

Julian, intensely bored with both her and her social climbing, advised her to try less hard. There was no point getting uppity if people didn't socialize the way she wanted, he said. Ailsa's idea of a good time was to sit on charitable committees. James's was to shut himself in his library in order to compile his family's history. They were private people, and they weren't remotely interested in wasting time on trivial chatter or dressing up for drinks and dinner parties. How did he know all this? Eleanor had asked. A chap in the pub had told him.