I tried to be as gentle as possible. ‘You may have forgotten. But you knew George Saunders, didn’t you? The man who asked to change rooms and went into room sixteen. He was your headmaster when you were at school at Bromeswell Grove.’

It had taken me an hour on the Internet to get the information that I needed. There are dozens of websites that help old school friends reconnect: Classmates.com, SchoolMates, and so on. Bromeswell Grove also ran its own very active message board. I had been interested that a retired headmaster had been booked into the room where Frank Parris was killed and, almost on a whim, I had decided to check out if he had any connection with any of the staff or guests who had been at Branlow Hall at the time of the wedding. Derek’s name had very quickly leapt onto my screen.

Reading the posts – and then cross-referencing them with Facebook – it was obvious to me that Derek had been viciously bullied at school (‘fat’, ‘retard’, ‘wanker’) and that decades later he was still being trolled online. Saunders didn’t get off lightly either. He was a bully, a bastard, a paedophile, a pedant. As far as his ex-students were concerned, he couldn’t drop dead soon enough.

Alan Conway used to say that the Internet was the worst thing that ever happened to detective fiction – which was one of the reasons why he set his own stories back in the fifties. He had a point. It’s hard to make your detective look clever when all the information in the world is instantly available to everyone in the world at a moment’s notice. In my case, I wasn’t trying to look clever. I was simply searching for the truth. But I’m sure Atticus Pünd wouldn’t have approved of my methods.

‘Why are you talking about George Saunders?’ Gwyneth asked. ‘He was a horrible man.’

‘He was at the hotel,’ I said. I was still talking to Derek. ‘You saw him.’

Derek nodded miserably.

‘Did he see you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he say anything.’

‘He didn’t recognise me.’

‘But you recognised him.’

‘Of course I did.’

‘He was a horrible man,’ Gwyneth repeated. ‘Derek never did anything wrong, but the other boys ganged up on him and Saunders never did anything about it.’ She would have gone on but she had run out of breath and had to reach for the oxygen cylinder again.

‘He always picked on me.’ Derek continued where his mother had left off. There were tears in his eyes. ‘He used to make jokes about me in front of all the others. He said I was useless, that I would never have any future. It’s true. I was never good at that stuff – school and everything. But he said I’d never be a success at anything.’ He cast his eyes down. ‘Maybe he was right.’

I stood up. I was feeling ashamed, as if I had joined the trolls and the bullies by coming here. ‘It’s not true at all, Derek,’ I said. ‘The Trehernes think the world of you. You’re part of their family. And I think it’s wonderful the way you look after your mother.’

God! How much more patronising could I sound? I made my excuses and left as quickly as I could.

As I got back into my car, I reflected on what I had learned. I kept going over and over one thought in my mind. Just about every student who had been at Bromeswell Grove had disliked George Saunders. They’d all wanted him to drop dead. Just the sight of him had been enough to reduce Derek Endicott to a jabbering wreck.

But it had been Frank Parris who had died.

Katie

I’d phoned ahead and told Katie I was coming but for once I wasn’t looking forward to seeing her.

She was in the garden when I pulled into Three Chimneys, pottering about with gardening gloves and a pair of secateurs, deadheading the roses or pruning the marigolds or whatever else it was that would make her perfect house just that little bit more perfect. I love Katie. I really do. She’s the only line of continuity running through the haphazardness of my life, even though there are times when I’m not even sure if I really know her.

‘Hello!’ she greeted me brightly. ‘I hope you don’t mind a scrap lunch. I’ve bought it in, I’m afraid. Quiche from Honey + Harvey in Melton and a salad I’ve thrown together.’

‘That’s fine … ’

She led me into the kitchen, where the lunch had already been laid out, and took a jug of home-made lemonade out of the fridge. She has a recipe where you mush up whole lemons with sugar and water and of course it tastes a whole lot better than anything you’ll get out of a can or a bottle. The quiche had been warmed in the oven. There were even proper cloth servieltes in metal rings. Who does that anymore? What’s wrong with a square of kitchen roll?

‘So how’s it all going?’ she asked. ‘I take it the police haven’t found Cecily Treherne.’

‘I’m not sure they ever will.’

‘You think she’s been killed?’

I nodded.

‘That’s not what you said the last time you were here. You thought it might just have been an accident, that she could have fallen into a river or something.’ She considered what I’d just said. ‘If she was killed, then you think that she was right and Stefan Whatever-his-name-was was innocent after all?’

‘That about sums it up.’

‘So what’s changed your mind?’

It was a good question. At that moment I didn’t have a clue – and I mean that in every sense. I’d talked to people, I’d made pages of notes, but nobody had slipped up; nobody had said anything or done anything that obviously pointed the finger at them. All I had, really, were vague feelings. If you’d asked me to draw up a list of suspects in order of likelihood, it would have looked something like this:

Eloise Radmani

Lisa Treherne

Derek Endicott

Aiden MacNeil

Lionel Corby

Eloise and Derek had both overheard the fatal telephone call. Lisa Treherne had serious jealousy issues with Cecily and had been jilted by Stefan. Aiden was married to Cecily and despite all appearances to the contrary, he still remained the most obvious suspect. Lionel was the least likely – but I hadn’t liked him when I first met him and I thought there was something about him that just smelled wrong.

So where was I exactly?

In Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, the two deaths happen for very different reasons and, of course, it turns out that there are two killers. I was almost certain that what I was dealing with was simpler, that Cecily had been silenced for exactly the reason that her parents had suggested to me. She knew too much. She had rung them from a public place and she had been overheard.

She knew who killed Frank Parris because she’d read the book. I’d read it too, and even though I must have seen what she’d seen, for some reason it had completely passed me by. I was beginning to realise that I should have asked more questions about Cecily, her likes and dislikes, her preoccupations; I’d have had a better idea of what might have registered with her.

‘It’s just a feeling,’ I said in answer to Katie’s question. ‘Anyway, I’ve only got today and tomorrow. Lisa Treherne has asked me to leave.’

‘Why?’

‘She thinks I’m wasting her time.’

‘Or maybe she thinks you know too much.’

‘That thought had occurred to me too.’

‘You can move in here if you like.’

I would have liked that. I wanted to be close to Katie. But in view of the conversation we were about to have, I knew it wouldn’t be possible.

‘Katie,’ I said. ‘You know how fond I am of you. I’d like to think we’re close.’

‘We are close.’ She smiled at me but I could see the fear in her smile. She knew what was coming.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Gordon?’ I asked.

She tried to brazen it out. ‘What about Gordon?’

‘I know about Adam Wilcox,’ I said.

Five simple words and I saw her crumple. There was nothing dramatic: no tears, no anger, no exclamations. It was simply that in that one second all the pretence with which she’d surrounded herself – the flowers, the exotic salad, the home-made lemonade, the quiche from some fancy deli in Melton – was revealed to be exactly that, not real, and as it evaporated the desperate sadness that had been lurking behind it all along came bursting through. I would have seen it earlier if I hadn’t been so obsessed with a crowd of people who had absolutely nothing to do with me. Oh yes, I’d picked up on the dead bush, the typos in her email to me, Jack’s smoking, his motorbike, but I hadn’t allowed them to make any emotional connection. I’d treated them like clues in a secondary crime story, something to be solved rather than taken to heart.