“Where did he come from? Anything known?”

“He’s been here since before the old master died. Sir Sidney knew him. From his army days? He fetched up here as a down-and-out … oh, thirty years ago … and Sir Sidney, who was a very generous man, gave him a part time job, helping with estate work, sometimes with the horses. He’s been here ever since. He ‘arrives with the cuckoo, that harbinger of Spring, and leaves the moment Jack Frost returns to crackle the surface of the moat with his icy breath.’ That’s what he tells the guests in his spirit-of-nature way. May to September, in my vocabulary. His sister’s a seaside landlady in Southend. She’d tell you she kicks her brother out at the arrival of the first summer holiday-maker and doesn’t let him back until the last one has left. The man’s a total fraud and an exploiter of the Truelove family’s generous nature. My advice—don’t ever ask him to take his mask off.”

“Too late, Mrs. B.! I have looked on the true face of the nasty, blood-sucking rogue. But I see worse in the mirror every morning.” He grinned as he pointed to his left cheek. “And he hasn’t done much to improve the landscape. I owe him one.”

“Well, if you want to know more, Mr. Styles will inform you. He’s been here longer than any of us.”

Joe thanked her for her help and drained his herb tea. “Now then, Ben,” he said and turned to Mrs. Bolton. “If you can spare this excellent chap for another half hour, we’ll get back to work.”

THE WELL-OILED LOCK clicked and the door swung open on Grace Aldred’s room. Cheerful and well appointed, Joe thought. In many ways a plainer version of her mistress’s boudoir. Everything here was scaled down in size, subdued in colour, less sumptuous in quality. A dressing table (pinewood, not mahogany) was draped in a white machine-made lace cloth and Grace’s brush and comb (tortoiseshell, not silver) were laid before a swivelling mirror on barley-sugar twist uprights. The curtains were of a pretty chintz but of a pattern too large for the room. They’d been cut down to size from some grander space, Joe thought. The bed was pin neat and made up with fresh linen but even here the coverlet showed signs of thrift; it was a patchwork sewn from scraps of silk and velvet. A square of embroidery had been left ready to be picked up again on the footstool by the one comfortable chair set beside the fireplace. To occupy the few quiet moments before the bell he noticed on the wall next to it rang to summon Grace to her mistress a few yards down the corridor.

The personal items were sparse. A photograph of two little girls in their Sunday best. Grace and her sister? A copy of last week’s Film Fun magazine by the bedside, open at a photograph of Cary Grant. There was little of Grace herself here. She seemed to be merely an adjunct to her mistress, herself a faded scrap, a piece of the household patchwork.

Joe stood quietly in the doorway, absorbing the atmosphere with Ben moving in anxiously behind him. Joe recognised that Ben’s loyalties were being stretched again. He was uncomfortable with his own presence in a maid’s room and doubly uneasy that Joe was here, missing no details with his sharp, trained eye.

“I don’t think this is going to take long, Ben,” he said. “Don’t worry—we’re not going to have to search through sock drawers and read entries in diaries. If I’ve got this right, Grace will never know we’ve even been in here. Come in and shut the door. Look around. What was it you suppose Grace wanted someone in authority to see? It all looks perfectly normal to me.”

“Nothing here.” Ben shrugged and took a pace back towards the door.

Joe fingered the key ring. “Hang on. What’s this? Two more small keys. What do they unlock?”

Ben took them, feeling the weight. “This here’s the key to her maid’s box. That’s kept up in the attic with the trunks when it’s been unpacked. This other one …” He glanced around. “It must unlock the wardrobe. That’s where she keeps her uniform and her spare shoes.”

“Have a look, shall we?”

Joe unlocked the large cupboard which, in an earlier, more glorious existence, must have been called an armoire. He was faced by a neat array of uniform, dark blue morning and pale blue afternoon dresses, lined up on embroidered hangers padded out with lavender stuffing. Heavier winter coats and serge dresses lurked behind them, protected from the moth by balls of fragrant cedarwood dangling like rough necklaces from the hangers. He was about to close the door when he smelled it. A base undertone, barely holding its own against the predominant cedarwood and lavender. As he shunted forward a handful of garments the smell intensified. He worked his way beyond the winter clothes to the back of the cupboard and the last item of clothing was revealed. A dark green waterproof cape of the kind ladies used to cover themselves when out riding occupied the space, looking, in its deliberate isolation, rather sinister, Joe thought. He pulled it forward on its hanger and looked around for somewhere to carry out an inspection.

“Not on the bed, sir,” Ben took over. “I’ll put it over here on the floorboards in case something’s in there as shouldn’t be. Cor! What a pong! That’s not mothballs!” He spread it out and held it down by the shoulders as though he expected it to leap up and resist arrest.

“The mistress’s riding-out-in-inclement-weather coat. But what’s it got in its pockets? Sorry about this, Ben.” Feeling rather like the Great Magnifico two minutes into his act, Joe took a pair of rubber gloves, Scotland Yard issue, from his trouser pocket and slipped them on. “Just in case we’re landed with poisons of some nature to deal with …” he murmured apologetically.

He felt in the right pocket and encountered a small hard lump. “Take my handkerchief from my breast pocket, Ben, and spread it here by me.”

The dark brown-grey, slightly crumbling mess he scooped out was greeted with a schoolboy’s exclamation of disgust by Ben. “Urgh! It’s sh—horse-excrement! What’s she doing with that in her pocket!”

“Not shit, Ben. No, something infinitely more evil! Horse-droppings are ambrosial in scent compared with this stuff.” Joe was beginning to feel queasy and recognised that without Adelaide Hartest’s sound talking-to, he would have been dashing straight for the jug and ewer on the toilet table. “Hard to believe, but that substance was once a slice of Mrs. Bolton’s excellent gingerbread.”

“Where did it get the stink, then? And why?” Ben wanted to know.

“I could give you the recipe for the very special frosting but you wouldn’t want to hear it. I’ll just say it’s a mixture of decayed animal parts—stoat’s liver being one. It’s a magic formula for scaring horses. Yes, scaring them. They’ll take fright and try to run away on catching scent of this.”

“Anyone offering a lump of this to a savage horse …” Ben had got there and his face froze into pale disbelief.

“Anyone standing in the entrance to the horse’s stall will be cleared out of the way in the horse’s instinctive effort to escape,” Joe confirmed Ben’s fears. “It will use its teeth and hooves and frantic strength to obliterate what it perceives as the horror that’s advancing on it.”

Joe reminded himself that it had been Ben, tip-toeing along in his patent-leather slippers, who had come upon the awful scene and had stood guard over the body with a raging stallion crashing about an open stable. “But you were there, Ben. You saw the results for yourself,” he said quietly. He’d noticed that the lad’s teeth were chattering at the memory.

“I was lucky then,” he said when he could get the words out. “Having smashed her up, he went backwards into his stall, shivering. People say I was brave to have stuck it out down there but—the honest truth is—I reckoned that big feller was more scared than I was. Poor devil! Poor lady!”