“But Cecily Truelove?” Joe questioned. “She seems to think she also has booked an operating slot with the same surgeon at the same time. I’m sure she has no concern for little Phoebe Pilgrim—if she even remembers her. No, Cecily would appear to be calling for an invasive procedure to be carried out dangerously close to her family’s heart. Why would she do that?”

“It can only be that she knows Lavinia’s death was managed and she thinks she knows who’s responsible. She must have every confidence that the prime suspect—who, in anyone’s book, must be her own son, James, the victim’s husband—is in the clear. Otherwise she wouldn’t countenance your presence within fifty miles. The guilty party must be someone she regards as untouchable by her—someone with influence—or even perhaps very close to her. She wants the guilty party removed by an impartial police officer with sufficient authority to effect that removal.”

“This gathering she’s organising …” Joe said, casting a fly on the water. “She’s re-creating the April house-party, isn’t she? She’s re-enacting the whole show for my benefit. It’s a trap for some poor bugger. Thanks to her careful arrangements, the murderer will be tethered here at Melsett for the next few days, drawbridge up, ready for the strong hand of the Law to feel his collar. He’ll not have dared to turn down the invitation for fear of arousing suspicion. He’ll be giving me a rictus grin over his sherry glass and nervously muttering, ‘So, they tell me you’re a policeman …’ ” He looked searchingly at Hunnyton. “I do wonder why she couldn’t just have had recourse to the Cambridge detective division. To you, Superintendent.”

“Thought you’d get there if I waited long enough. I could go on about prophets in their own country having no respect. Home-grown boy, regrettably intertwined with the family and all that. But the real reason—I’ll say it now I know you’ve worked it out—is that you’re looking at the murderer.” He cast a swift glance at Joe, looking for something in his reaction and fiddled with his pipe in the annoying way pipe smokers have, using the time for thought or emphasis or just to annoy. “In her eyes, I’m the bloke who killed Lavinia, and she’s going to do her level best to prove that. It’s a risk for me but it’s one I’m prepared to take to get you in there. This boil needs lancing.” He waved a nonchalant hand around the room. “If you have to run for shelter from the outfall, remember the door’s never locked. Consider this your retreat—your bunker if you like. You may like to know I keep a pair of guns loaded and ready up there in my bedroom. Purdeys.”

“Purdeys, eh?” Joe waggled his eyebrows.

“His own guns. Made to measure. He had long arms like me. They were the old man’s gift when he died.”

A valuable legacy but could it ever have been appreciated by the man’s oldest-born son, who had to stand by and watch the estate moving over to his younger, legitimate brother? Hunnyton showed no sign of teeth-gnashing resentment.

“Well, thank you for the offer!” Joe grinned. “Sharing a redoubt with killers—it’s what I’m used to. I know how to watch my back as well as my front.”

Fair warning, he thought.

CHAPTER 12

The Lagonda stopped at the bottom of the lime avenue at the point where some ancient landscape artist had calculated the visitor was best placed to be impressed by what, as Hunnyton had hinted, was one of the loveliest houses in England. Or anywhere.

The eye was led by the geometry of the row of sentinel trees straight over an expanse of deer-cropped grass, rising upwards to the bridge over a hidden moat and beyond, the grand façade. Hunnyton turned off the engine and they looked in silence.

“Towers and battlements it sees

Bosomed high in tufted trees,

Where perhaps some beauty lies,

The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.”

Hunnyton’s voice was quiet, as though speaking to himself.

“Milton had something entirely more medieval in mind, I think,” Joe said. “It’s bosomed high all right, and those tufted trees framing it look very like thousand-year-old oaks to me, but the house itself isn’t very battlemented. No towers or crenellations … no martial intent whatsoever, I’d say. Jacobean? You’d expect it. No one feared being attacked by the neighbours any longer by that time. The Count of the Saxon Shore had long ago sheathed his sword or beaten it into a ploughshare. The nearest you get to martial is those pinnacles either side of the gatehouse, and they remind me very strongly of the ones we passed this morning on King’s College Chapel.”

Hunnyton nodded in agreement. “It gets even more collegiate inside. It’s built in a square shape with an interior quadrangle complete with storey-high oriel window leading to the great hall.”

“A house for a scholar rather than a soldier, would you say?”

“It’s had its share of both,” murmured Hunnyton. “But the shape lends itself to comfortable living. There’s a very generous kitchen block to the northeast of the hall so the food doesn’t take forever to reach the table. There are company rooms on three sides on the ground floor, with different aspects. On the east there’s what they call a ‘summer parlour’ and on the sunnier south side another one called the ‘winter parlour.’ Oh, by the way, Sandilands, they don’t have anything so common as a ‘breakfast room.’ When you come yumming down for your devilled kidneys in the morning, you’ll find they’re being served in the east-facing summer parlour …”

“Don’t worry,” Joe interrupted. “I’ll just do what I usually do and follow my nose.”

Joe wondered again what thoughts were going on behind those deceptive eyes. Here was the firstborn (according to his own evidence) of the old lord’s sons. Disqualified from ever taking possession of the pile before him by the lowliness of his mother’s birth. Yet, by his situation, tied to the place. A tie at first of necessity but now of love, Joe judged from a fleeting expression on the man’s face. An emotion which was quickly corrected by the irony in his speech. Joe, a second son, although from much more modest circumstances, could begin to understand the envy, the anger, that the younger in line could feel. His own chagrin at the inevitable loss of his family home had been tempered by his complete lack of interest in farming and his older brother’s instinctive ability for it. But what if it had been the other way around?

“I’ll walk the rest of the way from here. Get acclimatised. I’ll just take my notebook and a pencil.”

“Good thought. Better not to arrive together, mob-handed like,” Hunnyton commented. “Some of the guests may be there already. They wouldn’t want to think a posse of lawmen was forming up to put a damper on their high jinks. I’ll leave you then. You can find your way through the stable block over there.” He waved to the right. “You won’t have time to stop for a chin-wag though or you’ll be late for lunch. The old girl is very punctual. You’ve got twenty minutes before she shakes out her napkin. I’ll drop your luggage off with the butler and then, Commissioner, you’re on your own.”

As he started up the engine again he called over his shoulder to Joe: “Watch out for the green man! If you catch him, do everyone a favour and drown him in the moat.”

JOE FROWNED AS he watched the Lagonda disappear. “Drown the green man,” had he said? He tried to make sense of it. Some medieval country custom? Or: the Green man? A lawyer who’d annoyed him? A bad-tempered chap who cut the lawns? He smiled and shook his head.

Joe didn’t want to be seen marching alone straight down the centre of the lime avenue. Too exposed. He preferred to come crabwise at buildings, at people, down trenches. There was no glory and no sense in a strutting advance across open ground into the teeth of the cannon. He’d learned that much. He’d saved his own skin and that of hundreds of his men, he reckoned, by simply not hearing orders of a suicidal nature passed down the line. Others had taken the same precautions. There were more effective ways of achieving your aims. Joe had learned far more from rear offices than he ever had from façades, he reckoned.