She looked back at him stonily, unable to respond to his emotion.

Joe controlled his desperation and said more soberly, “We’ve no worthy part to play here, Dorcas, you and I.”

At last a smile but the comment that accompanied it was barbed. “Part? I thought you were playing Major Domo perfectly, Joe. How ever would we manage without you?”

Disgust with himself and anger with Dorcas provoked a brusque response. “Time, perhaps, to let you find out!” He began to walk to the door.

A stifled gasp made him look back. The familiar face was wearing an unfamiliar expression—saddened and disbelieving. But it was the expression of a girl who’s just been given the news that her favourite dog has to be put down, Joe judged, distressing enough, but hardly the emotion of a girl whose lover is leaving.

They stared at each other in silence for an uncomfortable moment as seven years of intimacy crumbled between them. Joe resisted the urge to stride back and seize her in a comforting hug. This girl, suddenly a stranger, might well have screamed for help. He began to speak to her urgently, confidingly, appealing to a quality he knew she still possessed: her enquiring intelligence.

“Listen Dorcas! You’ve always been my equal in ‘sleuthing’ as you call it. Join me in one last combined effort will you? Working together, we can flush out the person really responsible for Lavinia’s death. You do want to know, don’t you? You have to know!” He waited for her reluctant nod before he continued. “It will involve trickery, lies, floods of tears and possibly fisticuffs. How about it? What do you say?”

“Not sure about the tears, but all the rest I can manage,” she said dubiously. “And I’ll do anything I can to clear James’s name. I told you—that’s why I’ve come back here to this terrible place. I would much rather have worked it out for myself without benefit of your conjuring tricks but … Oh, go on, Joe.”

Joe went on, eager but uncertain, his plan evolving as he talked. It sounded ridiculous to his ears but Dorcas began suddenly to smile and the smile widened. “Same old Joe!” she said. “Still the Fusilier! If in doubt stage a controlled explosion!”

Finally: “It’ll never work. And, if it does, you’ll be thrown out of whatever clubs you’re still a member of. You’ll lose your job and they’ll cut off your buttons with a ceremonial sabre.”

“Lucky if it’s just my buttons,” he said, managing a rueful grin.

CHAPTER 22

All he could do was get on with his job. Finish, point an accusing finger, pose for the camera and leave. He’d had enough. In fact he rather thought he’d talked himself into a solitary dash down into France, where he’d always found a balm for his emotional abrasions. Just one more piece of evidence and he could be reasonably sure he knew who had tricked Lavinia Truelove into walking into her death in the stable.

All was quiet in the telephone room. Sunday lunch time in the outside world. He was surprised there was even an operator on duty.

“A trunk call please, Miss, to a London number … Julia! Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you on a—”

“Joe! At last! Ralph was just wondering where you’d got to. Here he comes. Don’t keep him talking—he was just about to carve the leg of lamb and we’ve got my mother-in-law for lunch.”

There was a clunk as Superintendent Cottingham seized the telephone. “I managed! Not easy—you know what these highfalutin lawyers are like. Upshot is—no surprises. Lavinia Truelove’s last will and testament turns out to have been her first and only will and testament. Drawn up at the time of her marriage, on lines agreed by her father, it has remained gathering dust on a shelf, unaltered since the day she signed it. No attempt was ever made to look at it again. She retained control of what I’ll call her ‘resources’—sounds more modern than ‘marriage settlement.’ ”

“These resources, Ralph? Any indication …?”

“I tried to find out how much we were contemplating. I gave their discreet Mr. Brewer a choice of ‘plentiful/comfortable/adequate.’ He picked ‘plentiful.’ Throughout her married life she spent freely, to the advantage of the Truelove estate, apparently. Nothing we didn’t know in all this. No dramatic changes in her will of the kind we favour, like—all to my lover, Vicenzo, the second footman, or to Pets’ Paradise, or the Communist Party. Nothing of the sort. ‘Everything of which I die possessed’ etcetera goes to husband, James. Full stop.”

“So James finds himself in undisputed sole possession of the plentiful resources. Hmm … Ah, well. Rather dashes one of my theories to the ground. I’ve been going through the account books. All the same—that’s something we needed to know. Another piece of the jigsaw. One more piece of blue sky but the picture builds.”

Joe must have sounded despondent. Ralph hurried on, in a voice trying to suppress a triumphant chortle: “But there is something more. Perhaps even the four corner pieces? Something old Brewer let slip right at the end when he shouldn’t have. Something in response to a remark I made with a dash of low cunning as I thanked him and signed off. That’s when pompous prats let their defences down, I find. Right when they think they’re getting shot of you and you’ve sportingly admitted defeat. That’s the moment! What I do is think of my best judgement on the situation and then I completely reverse it, however ludicrous it may seem. I make a throw-away remark on these lines, assuming the bloke I’m conning is in the know, as am I.”

“I think I follow. Not trying some mind trick out on me are you, Ralph?”

“Never! Usually I get a stunned silence while they work it out and the length of that can be revealing. Other times I get an outraged denial and correction. Even better. But just occasionally, I get a wondering agreement and a spluttering: ‘Now how the devil did you know that? Our Police are getting to be a force to be reckoned with!’ This was one of those occasions. It’s word for word the response I got from Mr. Brewer when I flew a very chancy kite in his face!… Just finishing, darling!… Now—listen to this, Joe!”

JOE REPLACED THE receiver and instantly reconnected with the operator. He looked anxiously at his watch. Cyril Tate was probably well into his second dry sherry at the Cock in Fleet Street. But no. He was still at headquarters and Joe’s call had him on the line in seconds.

“Of course I’m here! It’s still Ascot weekend down here in the Metropolis. Another hour’s copy to write up before I dash off to the next event—tea with a duchess. Make it quick, Joe.”

Matching Joe’s own urgency, Cyril answered his questions with the curt, pared-down sentences of the airman he had once been and ditched the society commentator’s persiflage. “In the last year? I’m fishing my diary from my pocket as we speak. It takes me back as far as last January.”

Joe heard pages rustle and he pictured Cyril thumbing through his large-sized, heavily scrawled over and full-to-bursting record of social engagements. “February … here we are … You’ll have to depend on my memory for this one. The birthday ball out in Wiltshire of Amanda Seacombe … As well as the many royal cousins clustering round, there was present your person of interest: Dorothy Despond. Attending with her father. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t write down the whole guest list but I’m pretty sure the Trueloves were there. James and Lavinia.”

“Evidence of this? I can’t afford to get it wrong, Cyril. Lives at stake.”

“Make that ‘certain’ then. I can send you the shots if you like. Otherwise a back copy of Tatler will confirm. Hang on! Come to think of it … skipping on a bit … Here she is again in March. Literary and Arty jamboree in Hertfordshire.” Cyril flinched at the memory. “One of those god-awful shows where they expect you to roll your sleeves up and paint a watercolour, write an ode and stuff an owl. All in the space of one wet weekend.”