‘Would you mind if I took notes, Detective Chief Inspector?’ Miss Cain asked, drawing a pen and a shorthand pad out of her handbag.

‘Please go ahead.’ Hare had produced his own notebook. He cleared his throat. ‘The trouble with this investigation is that it should be fairly cut and dried. This is a small community. Miss James was an extremely well-known figure. And there’s a time period of just seventeen minutes in which the crime must have taken place. I don’t know why the answer isn’t more obvious.’

‘It is my experience that the more obvious the answer, the more difficult it can be to find,’ Pünd remarked.

‘You may be right, sir.’ Hare opened his own notepad and referred to what he had written. For the next few minutes, he spoke uninterrupted.

‘The last person to see Miss James alive was her husband, Francis Pendleton. You may wonder why I don’t refer to her as Mrs Pendleton, incidentally, but she was known to the whole world by the name with which she appeared in her films and that’s the name she used here. Mr Pendleton is ten years younger than his wife and comes from a wealthy family. His father is Lord Pendleton, a Conservative peer, and I’m afraid he didn’t approve of the marriage, so his son was subsequently cut off without a penny, as they like to say.

‘There is a suggestion that there was a certain amount of friction between Francis Pendleton and his wife. Of course, there’s a lot of gossip in a place like Tawleigh-on-the-Water and it only makes my job more difficult, trying to separate truth from speculation. Anyway, they have a cook and a butler who live in the house – a nineteenth-century folly by the name of Clarence Keep, about half a mile outside the village. The two halves of Clarence Keep – that is, the part for Miss James and Francis Pendleton and the part for the servants – are carefully separated and sound doesn’t travel easily from one to the other, but even so they have told me there were occasions when they heard the two of them arguing. The Gardners, who run this hotel, have also confirmed that things between them were not going well.

‘Miss James was in a meeting, here at the Moonflower, which finished at 5.40 p.m. She went home, arriving just after 6 p.m. That time is confirmed by the cook and the butler, who saw her very distinctive car, a Bentley, draw in. According to Mr Pendleton, he and his wife had a brief and friendly conversation before Mr Pendleton left in his other car, an Austin, to attend the performance of an opera, The Marriage of Figaro, which started at 7 p.m. in Barnstaple. He left at 6.15 p.m., he says, although we only have his word for it as nobody saw or heard him go. His car was parked around the side of the house, out of sight of the servants’ quarters. Miss James was meant to be going with him, incidentally, but had decided that she wanted an early night.

‘So, if the evidence is to be believed, at 6.15 p.m. there were just three people in the house. Miss James was upstairs in her bedroom. Phyllis and Eric Chandler, the cook and the butler, were downstairs in the kitchen.’

‘They are husband and wife?’

‘No, sir. Mother and son.’

‘That is unusual.’

‘I’d say “unusual” is a good word to describe them.’ Hare coughed. ‘At about 6.18 p.m., a few minutes after Francis says he left, a stranger arrived at the house. We have no idea who he was. We only know of his existence because the Chandlers heard the dog barking. Melissa James had a pet chow by the name of Kimba. The dog always barked when strangers came to the door. If it was Melissa James or her husband or their servants or their friends, it remained silent. But at 6.18, it began to bark frantically. And a minute or two later, both the Chandlers heard the front door open and close.’

‘Neither of them left the kitchen to see who it was?’

‘No, Mr Pünd. They were off duty, meaning they were also out of uniform, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate. It’s a crying shame because if they’d only looked through the door the whole mystery might have been solved.

‘As it is, we have to ask ourselves this question. Did Melissa James open the door at 6.20 p.m. and allow a stranger into the house and was that person her killer? It would seem to be the natural conclusion. At 6.25 p.m., Phyllis and Eric Chandler did finally leave the house, taking Miss James’s Bentley. She had said they could drive over to Bude to visit Mrs Chandler’s sister, who was unwell. Eric noticed that the Austin was no longer there, by the way. And before you ask, there is absolutely no question that the Chandlers did actually leave Clarence Keep. I’ve spoken to a couple of witnesses who saw them drive past – you tend to notice a car like that – and the sister in Bude corroborates their story.

‘If I’m correct, Miss James was now alone in the house with someone who was a stranger to her. She became very upset and at 6.28 p.m. she made a call to Dr Leonard Collins, who was her GP and also a close friend, so it’s obvious that at that time she was still alive. Dr Collins was at his home in Tawleigh with his wife. I should perhaps mention that the call was logged at the local exchange and there can be no doubt that it took place. According to Dr Collins, Miss James was terrified. She said she needed help and asked him to come to the house. Samantha Collins, Dr Collins’s wife, was in the room when he took the call and was able to hear at least part of it. She saw him leave and happened to notice the time of his departure, which was 6.35 p.m.

‘Dr Collins arrived at Clarence Keep at 6.45 p.m. and was surprised to find the front door open. He went in. There was no sign that anything was wrong, but having heard what he had heard on the telephone call, he was concerned. He called out for Melissa but got no answer. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed but he still continued upstairs.

‘He found Miss James in her bedroom. She had been strangled with the cord from the telephone that stood on a cabinet by the bed. In the course of what must have been a violent struggle, the wire had been torn out of the wall. She had also struck her head on an ornamental table beside the bed. We found a contusion under her hair and there was a bloodstain on the wooden surface – AB positive, which was her blood type.

‘Dr Collins did everything he could to revive Miss James with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. According to his testimony, she was still warm when he arrived and he might have succeeded. Sadly, he didn’t. He called for the police and an ambulance at 6.56 p.m. – that call, of course, was also logged. A team was sent out from Barnstaple and arrived about thirty minutes later.

‘And that, Mr Pünd, is about the shape of it. I said that the murder could have taken place only within an interval of seventeen minutes and by that I mean between 6.28 p.m., when Miss James called the doctor, and 6.45 p.m., when he arrived. There are other details, other testimonies of which you need to be made aware, but actually they only complicate matters. What I’ve given you is the basic timeline. I’m fairly sure it’s accurate, but actually, that’s part of the problem. When you have everything down to the minute like this, it’s very hard to see how the killer could have seized his opportunity.’

‘You have assembled the facts and the timings with great precision, Detective Chief Inspector,’ Pünd remarked. ‘I am grateful to you. It will make our work a great deal easier at the end of the day.’

Hare smiled, perhaps acknowledging the word ‘our’ that Pünd had used.

‘Is there anything more you can tell me about the crime scene itself?’ Pünd asked.

‘Not a great deal. Melissa James had clearly been extremely upset in the moments before her death. We know that already from the call she made to Dr Collins, but we also found two balls of tissue paper on the floor of the bedroom and another in the sitting room. They were impregnated with lacrimal fluid.’

‘Tears,’ Pünd said.

‘She was crying when she spoke to Dr Collins. I hate to say this, Mr Pünd, but it seems highly likely that her attacker was actually in the house when she called her GP.’

‘That may well be the case, Detective Chief Inspector. Although it would beg the question as to why he allowed her to make the call if he was intending to kill her.’

‘That’s true.’ Hare flicked a page in his notebook. ‘She must have put up quite a struggle. The bed was in disarray, a lamp had been knocked over and there were several ligature marks around her neck, suggesting that she at least tried to escape from the telephone cord that was used to strangle her.’

He sighed.