I would go upstairs straight away to my chemical kitchen and prepare a delicacy that would have my hateful sisters begging for mercy. Yes, that was it! I would spice their egg salad sandwiches with a couple of grains of nux vomica. It would keep them out of decent company for a week.

I was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang.

“Dash it all!” I said. There was nothing I hated more than being interrupted when I was about to do something gratifying with chemicals.

I trudged down from the landing and flung open the door angrily.

There, looking down his nose at me, stood a chauffeur in livery: light chocolate coat with corded trim, flared breeches tucked into tall tan leather boots, a peaked cap, and a pair of limp brown leather gloves held a little too casually in his perfectly manicured hands.

I didn’t like his attitude, and, come to think of it, he probably didn’t like mine.

“De Luce?” he asked.

I stood motionless, waiting for decency.

“Miss de Luce?”

“Yes,” I said grudgingly, peering round his body as if there might be others like him hiding in the bushes.

The pantechnicon and vans had gone from the forecourt. A maze of snowy tracks told me that they had been moved round to the back of the house. In their place, idling silently in little gusts of snow, was a black Daimler limousine, polished, like a funeral coach, to an unearthly shine.

“Come in and close the door,” I said. “Father’s not awfully keen on snowdrifts in the foyer.”

“Miss Wyvern has arrived,” he announced, drawing himself to attention.

“But—” I managed, “they weren’t supposed to be here until noon …”

Phyllis Wyvern! My mind was spinning. With Father away, surely I couldn’t be expected to …

I’d seen her on the silver screen, of course, not just at the Gaumont, but also at the little backstreet cinema in Hinley. And once, also, when the vicar had hired Mr. Mitchell, who operated Bishop’s Lacey’s photo studio, to run The Rector’s Wife in St. Tancred’s parish hall, hoping, I suppose, that the story would arouse a feeling of sympathy in our parish bosoms for his rat-faced—and rat-hearted—wife, Cynthia.