“Yes. A dozen sat down to dinner in all. Small house party. Not down for the shooting I take it?”

“No. Game bird shooting season well over by then. But there was some shooting planned. They were hoping to take a few deer—more of a cull than for sport I’d say—and there’s always a few hare and rabbits. The men like to tramp about the place with a gun over their arm. It pleases them to think the meat on their plate for dinner is their contribution. The dogs enjoy the stirabout, too. But this was rather more one of those political power groups, I’d have thought. The ones that seem to convene when their host is up for promotion of some sort.”

Joe caught the bitterness in the tone and wondered whether Hunnyton was showing his hand at last.

“At least six—three married couples—could be judged to have political interests, the men being MPs of differing persuasions, in fact,” Joe recalled. “That’s one thing that impresses me about James Truelove—he’s open-minded, with friends and influence with all parties. That’s not easy to achieve. Then there was the inevitable newspaper magnate and his wife. And Sir James and Lady Truelove …” Joe hesitated.

“Leaving the last two—whom I won’t describe as a couple. They were put to sit next to each other I understand from the butler—Miss Dorcas Joliffe, Sir James’s protégée and student researcher, and, by her side, his young brother, Alexander.”

“How young?”

“Not that young. Mid-twenties. Alex was an afterthought and no one was more surprised than his mother when he made his appearance on the family tree after James and two daughters. Still, a spare is always a useful addition to the heir.”

“I blush to air such an obvious matter but I suppose I should ask: What are his chances of succeeding his brother to the baronetcy?”

“He’ll have to outlive him and count on James’s not producing a legitimate son. So—the chances are not good when the incumbent’s youthful and vigorous as James is. Still, James had been married to Lavinia for some years and produced no children …”

Once again, Joe felt himself prodded into drawing a conclusion: “The smart thing, if Alex had some scheme in mind to inherit, would have been to encourage an infertile situation to run its course.”

“Right. With Lavinia dead, Sir James is on the loose again and could well remarry. Time enough to produce an heir to dislodge Master Alex.”

“What is Alexander currently up to?”

“He’s living at the Hall at the moment, taking a year off after his banking job in the City before he goes out to Africa or some other spot unprepared as yet for his attentions.”

“He gave up a banking career?”

“Ah. Good question. He’ll tell you himself—he got out minutes before he was booted out. Brags about it. Gift of the gab, like all the Trueloves.”

“Seating him alongside Dorcas—was that an attempt at matchmaking by any chance?” Joe managed to keep his voice steady.

Hunnyton fought back a guffaw. “No chance! You’d hesitate to match anyone you liked or respected with Alex,” Hunnyton said gloomily. “They probably let him down to dinner to make up the numbers and the two misfits found themselves next to each other. No—Dorcas Joliffe was there at the specific, though last-minute, invitation of her ladyship.”

“Eh? What? Lavinia Truelove?” Joe was astonished. “The silliest woman in the Shires? She didn’t even know Dorcas. And Dorcas wouldn’t have bothered to exchange more than a dozen words with her. Asking for trouble to put them at the same table.” He bit his lip.

“Well, it’s a blessing that it’s a wide table and they weren’t in hair-tugging reach, the butler says. A right ding-dong going on. Sir James was embarrassed, her ladyship was ‘a trifle over-excited,’ in butler terms. In other words even worse than her usual overbearing self. But that’s just my interpretation of what was said. You can’t fault the servants. They know how to keep quiet. They only opened up as far as they did because it was me asking.”

“Did you manage to find out what they were quarrelling about?”

Hunnyton drained his glass and looked back uneasily to the bright lights of the hotel behind him as though wishing to evade the question. “Well, of course … social occasion and all that … there was no way even Lavinia was going to shrill, ‘Keep your thieving little hands off my husband.’ If that was the compulsion behind the rivalry. What they were ostensibly arguing about was horses,” he finished and looked down at his feet.

“Horses? What horses?”

“Any old nags. Lady Truelove may have been a ninny but what she was good at—the only thing she was good at—was riding. She was raised in a midlands hunting county so you’d expect it. Hunting, point-to-pointing … she could go faster, jump higher, stay on longer than any man, they say. I think your lady-friend saw straight through to what I’ve always suspected—that Lavinia had absolutely no feelings for the horseflesh itself. She’d arrive in the stables booted and spurred, climb aboard and ride. Ask her the name of the horse whose mouth she was wrecking and she wouldn’t have a clue. Never tended them, never even took them a carrot. She wasn’t tuned in to them in any way. Really she’d have been happier at the wheel of a sports car if she’d ever been bothered to learn to drive.”

“Ah. That wouldn’t have impressed Dorcas. She’s a damned good rider, too, but she tends to go about the place on shaggy ponies without a saddle. They follow her around like dogs. Trot at her heel in an obsequious way. I’ve seen beasts cross fields to come and nuzzle her neck. I think she prefers animals to people. I’d make faster headway with Dorcas if I were a deer-hound or a hairy-heeled Shire horse. She spent too many of her days with her father yarning around gypsy campfires when she was a little thing and she picked up some unusual skills. Her father’s a painter. A very good one, too, but he went through a stage of imagining he was Augustus John. You know—caravans, corduroy britches and clay-baked hedgehogs.” Joe shuddered gently.

“I see. Not a meeting of minds planned, then, in this invitation of Lavinia’s.”

“Not if she knew anything about Dorcas, no. I’m sure you’ve guessed correctly, Hunnyton, that this was really a rivalry over an imagined interest in or influence over Sir James. Imagined by the man’s wife, I mean. But how the hell are we to guess at the contents of that lady’s head on this occasion? She may have exaggerated the dangers of the situation.” Then, in a rush of confidence and a copper’s seeking after the full truth he added: “No, let me be clear. I have to say in Lavinia’s defence that her fears may well not have been entirely the product of hysteria and jealousy. Dorcas has confided to me that, though Sir James’s attentions to her have never been less decorous than would befit his position of mentor and sponsor, nevertheless, he has made it known that …” Joe hesitated, aware that he had plunged into a whirlpool of circumlocution to disguise his awkwardness.

“He wouldn’t mind at all getting into her knickers, like. Men! Buggers! I don’t know why women go on putting up with us. Got it. What we’re saying then is, as I suspected, all this horse stuff was a bluff, a diversionary tactic, an exchange of snowballs when bullets are not appropriate.”

“That’s exactly what I’d guess, knowing Dorcas as I do …” Joe fell silent.

“And knowing Lavinia as I did … I’d agree with you that the two women under one roof was an explosive situation. But, Sandilands, what are we on about? There was no explosion. Let’s hang on to this—Miss Dorcas had only just put in an appearance and was nowhere near the stables that night.”

Joe was soothed to hear the quiet good sense.

“It really was the horse that did it! He was caught red-toothed, you might say. The whole nasty business was witnessed by the most credible witnesses in the land. Two Suffolk boys. No one got pushed off a roof, bashed on the head with a candlestick or stuck with an assegai. It’s all right, sir. I’m sure you’ve no cause to fret.”