'Who is he?'

'He is . . . I don't know how to describe him, really. He was once a journalist, although I understand he gave that up long ago. He was a correspondent for The Times in Paris, which is where I came to know him.'

'So he was not an employee of your husband?'

'Oh, no. He has independent means. Why do you ask?'

'A name that came up,' I replied. I still didn't know what FO meant. Some religious order? 'Was your husband a Catholic?'

She smiled. 'His mother was, but John was brought up as an Anglican. His father was a vicar. But he was not a great churchgoer.'

'I see,' I replied.

'Here we are,' she said, opening a door on the second floor. 'This was his office. And where he fell.'

It was a room about eighteen feet square, the same size as the sitting room we had been in a few moments previously. And, presumably, directly above it. A simple but masculine room where the other had all the touches of a woman's hand. In this room brown dominated; the woodwork painted as mock oak, the curtains heavy velvet. A smell of tobacco hung in the air; heavy wooden filing cabinets filled one wall, and there were no paintings, only a few photographs in heavy silver frames. Family? Friends?

'All his family,' she replied. 'His parents, sisters and their children. He was fond of them all, but they rarely met after his mother died. She was a remarkable, if rather strange, woman. Foreign, like me. He got much of his drive from her, his kindness from his father. They all live in Shropshire, and rarely come to Town.'

'Would one have been close enough for him to have confessed an indiscretion?'

'I wrote and asked, but they said they knew nothing. By all means ask again, if you wish,' she replied. 'Now, this is his desk, and I had assumed that these documents would have been in this drawer.'

I saw that the whole left-hand pillar keeping the desk up was in fact one drawer, which, when opened, revealed a metal top. It was clearly immensely heavy, but slid out on hidden rollers underneath, which bore much of the weight.

'He had this built to his own requirements,' she explained. 'It was the sort of thing he liked to do.'

'He was a practical man?'

She laughed, thinking fondly. 'No, not a bit. He was the most impractical man I have ever known. I don't think I ever saw him do anything at all with his hands, besides eat, write and light his cigar. I meant he liked solving problems to his own satisfaction. Then he would get other people to turn his ideas into reality.'

I pulled at the lid on top of the strongbox; it came open easily. There were bundles of papers inside.

'Examine them if you wish,' she said. 'But you will find they are all deeds of our houses, and insurance policies and other domestic documents. I have looked carefully, but do so again if you want to.'

'Later, perhaps. Was the drawer locked or unlocked when you first came to see what was in here?'

'Locked. And the key was in John's pocket. At the morgue.'

'Is there another key?'

'I don't know.'

I stood and looked at the drawer for a few minutes, hands in my pockets, thinking. That was a waste of time; no blinding flash of inspiration came to me to solve the problem and make everyone's life easier. I even considered ridiculous possibilities, and lifted the carpet to see if a sheaf of papers was underneath. Lady Ravenscliff looked on impassively.

'I have searched thoroughly,' she commented.

I looked at her carefully. 'I know you have,' I said. And, for the first time, I really believed it. This was not a conclusion that would appeal to anyone with a fondness for tales of detection. Ask me why I concluded that she was telling me the truth, and I could give no satisfactory reason. Nothing had changed since I had walked the streets deciding that the exact opposite conclusion was the more likely. I merely wanted to believe her so much that my desire became reality. Instinct, guesswork, self-interest. Call it what you will. From that moment on I worked on the assumption that my employer was an honest and innocent woman.

She was not, however, particularly grateful for my faith. She scarcely seemed to notice it. Instead, she gestured at the window. 'This is where he fell,' she said quietly.

I walked over to the tall sash window in the wall opposite the desk. It was gigantic; some ten feet high as they are in buildings of this sort; stretching low and almost to the ground. The bottom of the frame was less than a foot from the floor, the top only a couple of feet from the ceiling. The two sashes were held shut by a highly polished brass clasp.

I tried to open it; it was stiff, but shifted eventually; the sash slid up only with difficulty and some noise. It was a long way to the ground, and looking out I could see that immediately underneath was a long stretch of thick, spiked, iron railings.

'How tall was your husband?'

'A few inches shorter than you,' she said.

'And not athletic, I assume?'

'Not in the slightest. He was not fat, but set no great store by exercise. Shortly before he died, he was wondering about installing one of these new elevators at the back of the house so he wouldn't have to walk up and down stairs.'

I smiled. 'Good for him. I was just wondering how he managed to fall out of this window. If he tripped on this carpet here, and stepped forward to regain his balance' – I performed the manoeuvre myself to show what I meant – 'then he should have cracked his head on the bottom sash. Certainly even the clumsiest of men should have been able to steady himself by grabbing the window frame.'

She was sitting in the little plush-velvet bucket chair by the fireplace now, her hands clasped together in her lap. 'I don't know,' she replied sadly. 'I didn't come up here until much later. I was out that evening, and did not get back until late. The police were waiting for me. They told me there had been an accident and I went directly to the hospital. He was already dead. I didn't come up here until late that day.'

'And the window was open?'

'No. One of the servants said he had closed it; it was raining and the water was coming in. And he tidied up the room as he does every morning.'

'And was it unusually disarranged?'

'That depends on what you mean by unusually. Once John was finished with a book or a newspaper – or anything, really – he would just drop it on the ground. I very much doubt he would have noticed even if the room was never tidied up. He lived in this house to please me, and because he thought it was the sort of house a man of his standing should live in. It isn't, of course; had we lived in such a place we would have bought something very much bigger. But he really had no taste for ostentation. We have another house in Paris, which was bought solely for my benefit. He was utterly uninterested in expensive living, although he did like good food and wine. And the sea. He always wanted to live by the sea, but had never managed it. We had planned to buy a house on the coast somewhere. The trouble was we couldn't agree where. I wanted Biarritz, he wanted Dorset. Curiously, he was a very simple man. You would have liked him, had you given him a chance.'

This sentence was added on so gently I almost missed it. 'You think I wouldn't have done?'

'I think you assume all rich men of business must be cruel and greedy by nature. Some are, no doubt. But in my experience they are no better or worse in general than any other class of man.'

'How many people were in the house at the time of the fall?'

'No more than twelve. My husband and the servants.'

'Everyone but your husband was asleep?'

'I imagine so. Although I have no doubt that some of the servants misbehave themselves when they are not watched. As long as they do their jobs, I do not interest myself in such things.'